GAZA: Zionist forces withdrew from a hospital complex in northern Gaza on Saturday, one day after storming it, and the Palestinian enclave’s health ministry said the troops had detained dozens of male medical staffers and some of the patients. Health officials said on Friday Zionist forces had stormed Kamal Adwan Hospital, one of three medical facilities struggling to operate in the area.

Footage circulated by the health ministry showed damage to several buildings after the Zionist forces withdrew. Medics said at least 44 of the facility’s 70-member team of the hospital had been detained by the army. It later said the army had released 14 of them, including the hospital’s director.

Medics said at least two children had died inside the intensive care unit after Zionist fire hit the generators and oxygen station in the facility on Friday. Medical staffers have refused Zionist army orders to evacuate the hospital or leave their patients unattended. Before the army raid, medics said at least 600 people had been in the hospital, including patients and their escorts.

“The safety and lives of patients who are left inside Kamal Adwan Hospital without medical staff and much needed medication are at risk now,” said Marwan Al-Hams of the health ministry. Three nurses were injured during the raid and three ambulance vehicles were destroyed, the ministry said.

Zionist military strikes on the towns of Jabalia, Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza have so far killed around 800 people during a three-week offensive, the Gaza ministry added. The Zionist military said on Friday that three of its soldiers were killed in combat in the north of the Gaza Strip.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) described the situation in northern Gaza as “extremely dire” and said people wishing to evacuate must be assured safe passage. “Ongoing evacuation orders, and continued restriction on introduction of essential supplies, leaves the remaining civilian population in north Gaza in horrific circumstances,” the ICRC said in a statement on Saturday.

“Hospitals are being told to evacuate, leaving a potential vacuum of medical services for the many civilians who remain, and are critically under-resourced while new patients continue to arrive,” it added. Senior Hamas official Basem Naim said the Zionist incursions in northern Gaza and storming Kamal Adwan Hospital were a violation of international humanitarian law that it could not have committed without “the protection of Western countries”.

“We saw mayhem and chaos... The emergency wards (in Kamal Adwan) were overflowing, and we saw numerous patients being brought in and horrific trauma patients, completely overwhelming the staff,” Rik Peeperkorn, WHO Representative for the occupied Palestinian territory said in an update on the operation.

The Gaza health ministry said a strike on houses in the southern city of Khan Younis killed at least 38, many of them women and children. Some residents of Khan Younis sifted through rubble on Friday in an attempt to retrieve clothes and documents, while children looked for their toys. Ahmed Sobh recounted how his cousin had screamed “Help me, help me”. “We ran and found her children, a boy and a girl, martyred. Her son was lying under the concrete column, it took us 1.5 hours to get him out,” he told Reuters.

Ahmed Al-Farra described digging relatives including his mother from the rubble, adding he had lost 15 members of his extended family during the airstrikes. “As I was trying to dig (my mother) out I looked at this wall and saw a tank aiming at me. I was thinking ‘shall I dig or shall I watch the tank,’ what shall I do? I dug her out full of fear. Everyone was doing the same, digging in fear,” he said. At the nearby Nasser Hospital, medics prepared the dead, among them three children wrapped in the same white shroud.

Meanwhile, Zionist strikes on three houses in the nearby Gaza town of Beit Lahiya killed 25 people and wounded dozens more, medics said. Later on Friday, a Zionist airstrike killed nine people in Shati camp in Gaza City, medics said, raising the number of Palestinians killed by Zionist fire across the enclave to at least 72 since Thursday night.

Separately on Saturday, Zionist forces killed a Hamas member during a raid in the city of Tulkarm, in the Zionist-occupied West Bank, the Zionist security force said in a statement. It claimed the man had been planning an imminent attack. Hamas said the man, identified as Islam Jamil Awda, had died “clashing with the occupation forces who besieged him for hours in a house in Tulkarm camp”. Violence has surged across the West Bank since the start of the Zionist war in Gaza. The death toll from the Zionist genocidal campaign in Gaza is approaching 43,000, with the densely populated enclave in ruins. – Agencies