A doctor in a southern Gaza Strip hospital told The Daily Beast that he and his colleagues would continue to work on patients despite a call from the Israeli military to evacuate and his own home being reduced to rubble.
The hospital is in the supposedly safe zone of Gaza where Israel has told civilians to seek shelter as it attacks Hamas targets in the north.
Dr Suahib Al Hamss told The Daily Beast via a voice message on Monday that his wife and children had been extracted alive from the wreckage of their house and taken to another hospital for treatment.
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“Even though my family are safe, all the people in Gaza are our family, and they’re all dying. And those dying are still our family, our wives and our children,” he said.
“We are still working at the hospital. We have scores of injured on a constant basis. Yesterday, we received scores of injured and many killed. The medical staff have not left the hospital for any length of time. The hospital is full of patients.”
Al Hamss, who went public with Israel’s apparent threat to strike the hospital on Sunday, said he did not believe his home had been targeted directly.
Al Hamss said the order to evacuate on Sunday was issued by a direct phone call to the hospital’s management, despite the fact that the hospital is in Rafah, in the south of the Gaza Strip, the portion of the territory to which Palestinians have been advised by Israel to flee.
The Kuwaiti Specialist Hospital raised the alarm on their Facebook page Sunday, saying that Israel had issued them a two-hour warning to evacuate the hospital. Dr Jamal Hams, medical director of the Kuwaiti Hospital in south Gaza, told the BBC that they had been ordered to evacuate.
Twenty-two hospitals in northern Gaza have been warned to evacuate, the New York Times has reported. However, this is believed to be the first incident of a hospital in the southern zone being ordered to do the same.
The World Health Organisation has condemned the orders given to hospitals to evacuate.
On Sunday, the doctor told The Daily Beast in an audio message that there were warplanes in the skies above the hospital, adding, “You can probably hear them.”
A clearly distressed Al Hamss accused the Israeli forces of breaking “all international laws” by targeting hospitals.
The messages will be seized on by critics of Israel as further evidence that the country is threatening to attack hospitals, which would be in violation of the Geneva Convention. Israel is preparing for what is expected to be a massive ground assault on Gaza in retaliation for last week’s horrific terror attacks on Israel by Hamas, which saw over 1400 people, including many women and children, brutally murdered and at least 199 taken hostage.
Israel has argued that by warning people in areas due to be bombed and attacked, it is taking unprecedented steps to minimize civilian casualties.
Dr Khalid Dawas, the director of gastro-intestinal surgery at University College London Hospital, passed the messages from Al Hamss to The Daily Beast.
“I met Dr Suhaib personally in June,” he said. “I have been sending him messages over the past week, just asking if he is OK, to which I have received some quite emotional replies. But the message he sent today (Sunday) was completely different, very panicky, saying they had been given two hours to get out. The hospital is in Rafa, which is where people have been told to go.”
The Daily Beast approached the Israeli Defence Forces office for comment.
