GAZA: Gaza hospitals reported being under constant fire and running on nearly exhausted supplies Saturday as the Zionist entity rejected key allies’ condemnation of a rising civilian death toll in the Hamas-controlled territory. The director of the besieged Palestinian territory’s largest hospital, Al-Shifa, said on Saturday the compound was struck repeatedly overnight and lost power for hours after its generator was hit.

“We received calls about dozens of dead and hundreds wounded in air and artillery strikes, but our ambulances weren’t able to go out because of gunfire,” said hospital director Mohammad Abu Salmiya. The Gaza health ministry said dozens of premature babies at Al-Shifa compound were at risk of dying because the lack of generator fuel meant their incu bators could be shut down on Saturday as fighting raged. They added one of the babies had died, and one person was killed and several others wounded in a strike on Al-Shifa early Saturday.

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Later Saturday, Physicians for Human Rights said, citing doctors there, that two premature babies have died due to power cuts at Gaza’s largest hospital as fighting rages around the Al-Shifa complex. “As a result of the lack of electricity, we can report that the neonatal intensive care unit has stopped working. Two premature infants have died, and there is a real risk to the lives of 37 other premature infants” at Al-Shifa hospital, the Zionist doctors’ group said in a statement.

No fuel has entered Gaza in more than five weeks of war, prompting multiple hospitals and clinics relying on generators to shut down. “The hospital is besieged, with no option to bring in the corpses and injured people sprawled outside. There is no movement in or out of the hospital,” Physicians for Human Rights said. “The picture we are now seeing at Shifa is no longer of a humanitarian catastrophe — it is a collective death sentence,” Physicians for Human Rights said.

The suffering in Gaza has prompted growing calls for a halt in five weeks of fighting in order to protect civilian lives and allow humanitarian aid into the densely populated territory. French President Emmanuel Macron said the Zionist entity had the right to defend itself but urged it to stop strikes on civilians in Gaza: “These babies, these ladies, these old people are bombed and killed.”

Islamic Jihad, another Palestinian armed group present in Gaza, said on Saturday its “fighters are engaged in fierce clashes in the vicinity of Al-Shifa hospital complex” and other areas of Gaza City, claiming to have caused “casualties in the ranks of the (Zionist) enemy forces”. Concern over the civilian toll has also come from staunch Zionist ally Washington, with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken saying Friday: “Far too many Palestinians have been killed.”

In northern Gaza, the director of the Indonesian hospital said lack of fuel forced the facility to cut power to thinks like their desalination plant, scanners and lifts. “The hospital is working with 30-40 percent of its capacity,” Atef Al-Kahlot said. “We call on the honorable people of the world, if any of them are left, to put pressure on the occupation forces to supply the Indonesian hospital and the rest of the hospitals in the Gaza Strip.”

Hospitals have become key sites for Palestinians seeking refuge from the intense gun battles and bombardment. A wounded boy at the Indonesian hospital, Youssef Al-Najjar, said he was waiting for surgery but the necessary machines were off due to lack of power. “I’m very thirsty but I’m not allowed to drink or eat until the operation is done,” he added. Twenty of Gaza’s 36 hospitals are “no longer functioning”, the UN’s humanitarian agency said.

Fighting has reduced some streets in Gaza to ruins, with the sounds of apparent explosions and gunfire caught Saturday on AFPTV’s Gaza City camera. The bodies of about 50 people killed in a strike on Gaza City’s Al-Buraq school were taken to the Al-Shifa hospital, its director said Friday. The Zionist entity on Saturday said its forces launched a air strike on the school that killed a Hamas company commander.

The exodus toward Gaza’s south, which has accelerated under intense fighting and through evacuation corridors, has seen tens of thousands of people flee in recent days. An estimated 30,000 additional Palestinians went southwards through a corridor opened by the Zionist military on Friday, according to the UN humanitarian affairs office OCHA. The Zionist military said that around 150,000 Palestinians have left in a “mass evacuation” south in recent days from the area of the northern Gaza Strip where combat is heavy.

However, strikes were hitting buildings at the southern end of Gaza in Rafah, the area of the densely-populated territory to which civilians have been urged to evacuate. “They struck us with a missile, and they are innocent people,” said Harb Fojou, standing near the rubble of a destroyed building. Almost 1.6 million people have been internally displaced since Oct 7, according to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees UNRWA — about two thirds of Gaza’s population. – AFP