TWENTY-NINE premature babies were evacuated from war-torn Gaza to Egypt on Monday as Israel launched a deadly strike on the territory’s Indonesian Hospital.
The Gaza health ministry charged that Israel’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 of the ministry which has reported a death toll of more than 13,000 as the Gaza war rages on into its seventh week.
Dozens more were wounded and around 700 people remained trapped inside the “besieged” medical centre, Qudra said.
More than 2.4 million Palestinians are trapped in besieged Gaza and only a few hundred war-wounded and foreign passport holders have been allowed out.
On Monday, Egyptian media reported that 29 premature babies evacuated from Gaza’s biggest hospital, Al-Shifa, had been taken to safety in Egypt through the Rafah crossing.
A medical source told AFP the infants would be treated at El-Arish hospital 45 kilometers (28 miles) west of the Gaza Strip or be taken to Ismailia or Cairo.
The bloodiest-ever Gaza war has seen Israeli troops raid, occupy and evacuate Al-Shifa hospital in recent days, spurring hundreds to flee the area on foot toward southern Gaza.
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 in the rain.
“There are only children and women in the house and no one else,” exclaimed one resident.
“How can that give them (the Israeli army) an excuse to hit it? … We don’t have any equipment to pull people out from under the rubble.”
