CAIRO: Zionist forces besieged hospitals and shelters for displaced people in northern Gaza on Monday as they stepped up their operations in the strip, residents and medics said. Troops rounded up men and ordered women to leave the Jabalia historic refugee camp, they said. A Zionist airstrike on a house in Jabalia killed five people and wounded several others, they added.

The UN Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA said Zionist authorities were preventing humanitarian missions from reaching areas in the north of the Palestinian enclave with critical supplies, including medicine and food. “People attempting to flee are getting killed, their bodies left on the street,” UNRWA head Philippe Lazzarini said on X.

Medics at the Indonesian Hospital told Reuters that Zionist troops stormed a school and detained the men before setting it ablaze. The fire reached hospital generators and caused a power outage, they added. Health officials said they had refused orders by the Zionist army, which started a new incursion into the territory’s north over two weeks ago, to evacuate the three hospitals in the area or leave the patients unattended.

Troops remained outside the hospital but did not enter, they said. Medics at a second hospital, Kamal Adwan, reported heavy Zionist fire near the hospital at night. “The army is burning the schools next to the hospital, and no one can enter or leave the hospital,” said one nurse at the Indonesian Hospital, who asked not to be named. Palestinian health officials said at least 18 people had been killed in Jabalia and eight elsewhere in Gaza in Zionist strikes.

The Zionist entity has intensified its campaigns both in Gaza and Lebanon after the killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar last week had raised hopes of an opening for ceasefire talks to end more than a year of conflict. “We are facing death by bombs, by thirst and hunger,” said Raed, a resident of Jabalia camp. “Jabalia is being wiped out and there is no witness to the crime, the world is blinding its eyes.” The Zionist entity claims that its attacks are aimed at “terrorists and terrorist infrastructure.”

Forced to live in toilets

Hadeel Obeid, a supervisor nurse at the Indonesian hospital, said they were running out of medical supplies, including sterile gauze and medications. The water supply has been cut off and there was no food for the fourth consecutive day, she told Reuters. The United Nations said it had been unable to reach the three hospitals in northern Gaza. The UN Human Rights Office accused Zionist forces of unlawful interference with humanitarian assistance and issuing orders that were causing forced displacement. It said their conduct “may be causing the destruction of the Palestinian population in Gaza’s northernmost governate through death and displacement”. UNRWA’S Lazzarini said injured people were lying without care in hospitals that had been hit. “UNRWA remaining shelters are so overcrowded, some displaced people are now forced to live in the toilets,” he said.

Residents and medics said Zionist forces had tightened their siege on Jabalia by positioning tanks in nearby Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahiya towns and ordering residents to leave. Zionist officials said evacuation orders were aimed at separating Hamas fighters from civilians and denied there was any systematic plan to clear out civilians. It said forces operating in northern Gaza killed scores of Hamas gunmen and dismantled infrastructure

Hamas accused the Zionist entity of carrying out acts of “genocide and ethnic cleansing” to force people to leave northern Gaza. The Hamas armed wing said fighters attacked forces there with anti-tank rockets and mortar fire, and detonated bombs against troops inside tanks and stationed in houses. — Reuters

Elsewhere in the enclave, Zionist strikes killed at least five people in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip and four in two separate strikes in Gaza City, medics said. The Zionist entity’s assault on Gaza has killed more than 42,500 Palestinians, with another 10,000 uncounted dead thought to lie under the rubble, Gaza health authorities say. — Reuters