GAZA: A Palestinian media source said Zionist occupation forces bombed the Kuwait School near the Indonesian Hospital in Gaza on Monday in a new act of brutal aggression. The Palestine News and Info Agency (WAFA) revealed Zionist artillery and tanks besieged the Indonesian Hospital and bombed it, adding that the forces fired several shells directly at the Kuwait School, which housed a number of displaced people.

The Palestinian agency indicated that number of martyrs and injured affected by the bombing was yet undetermined due to a telecommunications outage in northern Gaza. Additionally, the source said ambulances were unable to reach the school due to the occupation forces’ siege on the Indonesian Hospital and its surrounding areas.

The Gaza health ministry said the Zionist entity’s army killed at least 12 people in the strike on the Indonesian Hospital in the Palestinian territory’s north, a war zone where entire city blocks have been reduced to rubble. Those killed included patients, said Ashraf Al-Qudra, a spokesman for the ministry which has reported a death toll of more than 13,300 as the Gaza war rages on into its seventh week. Dozens more were wounded and 700 people remained trapped inside the “besieged” medical center, Qudra said.

The ministry director said it had not been possible to recover the bodies. “The (Zionist) occupation has destroyed some buildings of the Indonesian Hospital, and other buildings are under sniper fire,” Munir Al-Bursh said from the hospital. He said the 140-bed Indonesian Hospital currently has 650 patients, more than 100 of whom require urgent surgery, adding Zionist forces “targeted” people trying to leave the hospital. Zionist strikes have hit “the clinics and surgeries floor at the hospital, destroyed equipment and bodies are piled up”, he said.

The Zionist entity has pushed on with its withering air and ground campaign in Gaza. More than 2.4 million Palestinians are trapped in Gaza and only several hundred war-wounded, foreign nationals and dual passport holders have been allowed out. On Monday the UN World Health Organization said 28 premature babies evacuated from Gaza’s biggest hospital, Al-Shifa, had been taken to safety in Egypt through the Rafah crossing, revising down by one a number given by Egyptian media.

“All babies are fighting serious infections and continue needing health care,” the WHO said. The bloodiest ever Gaza war has seen Zionist troops raid, occupy and evacuate Al-Shifa hospital. The Zionist entity, backed by the United States, claims that Hamas has used vast tunnel networks below Al-Shifa for military purposes, but has yet to reveal evidence of a major military headquarters below ground.

After another Gaza building was hit, in Deir al-Balah south of Gaza City on Sunday, rescuers searched through the debris for survivors and bodies, using the lights of their mobile phones. “There are only children and women in the house and no one else,” exclaimed one resident. “How can that give them (the Zionist army) an excuse to hit it? ... We don’t have any equipment to pull people out from under the rubble.”

Alarm has surged over the dire humanitarian situation across Gaza where cold autumn rain has deepened the misery by soaking families living in tents and turning dust to mud. The WHO warned of spreading sickness with 44,000 cases of diarrhea and 70,000 acute respiratory infections registered in shelters. A field hospital sent by Jordan entered Gaza on Monday to treat patients in the south despite “catastrophic conditions” marked by “aggressive aerial and artillery strikes,” said Mohammed Zaqout, director-general of Gaza hospitals.

As intense urban combat raged in northern Gaza, many thousands more fled south on Sunday, said the UN humanitarian agency. Families walked along cracked roads as gunshots and explosions rang out in the distance. “It’s like the apocalypse,” said one tearful woman, Renad Al-Helou. “We are tired. There’s no water, no food ... There’s nothing left in Gaza. There’s only destruction, suffering and torture.”

The Zionist army said Sunday it was taking the Gaza fight against Hamas to “additional neighborhoods”. Artillery and airstrikes destroyed several houses in Gaza City, and doctors at the Al-Ahli hospital told AFP they had received dozens of dead and injured. Zionist forces were also reportedly pounding southern Gaza, where Doctors Without Borders said 122 casualties had arrived at a facility in Khan Yunis, 70 of them dead on arrival.

The Gaza war has sparked fears of a wider conflagration in the Middle East where the Zionist entity has long faced archenemy Iran and its allies.

Zionist tanks, a fighter jet and a helicopter struck the Iran-backed group Hezbollah in Lebanon on Monday, in response to earlier missile launches, the army said. Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels on Sunday said they had seized in the Red Sea a cargo ship owned by a Zionist businessman. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said the ship “was hijacked with Iran guidance by the Yemenite Houthi militia”, an allegation Iran rejected on Monday.

During a meeting with EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell on Monday, Jordan’s King Abdullah II called for a ceasefire in Gaza and an “end to the siege”. He warned of the “catastrophic effects of the ongoing heinous war, which is killing innocent, defenseless civilians”, as well as rising settler violence in the occupied West Bank. – Agencies