Middle East crisis live: Israel orders closure of one of last functioning hospitals in northern Gaza

Israel orders closure of one of the last functioning hospitals in northern Gaza

Hello, and welcome to the Guardian’s live coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza and developments in the Middle East more widely.

Israel late last night ordered the closure and evacuation of one of the last hospitals still partly functioning in northern Gaza.

The head of the Kamal Adwan hospital, Husam Abu Safiya, told Reuters that obeying the order to shut down was “next to impossible” because there were not enough ambulances to get patients out.

He said:

We currently have nearly 400 civilians inside the hospital, including babies in the neonatal unit, whose lives depend on oxygen and incubators. We cannot evacuate these patients safely without assistance, equipment, and time.

We are sending this message under heavy bombardment and direct targeting of the fuel tanks, which if hit will cause a large explosion and mass casualties of the civilians inside.

Abu Safiya said the military had ordered patients and staff to be evacuated to another hospital where conditions are even worse. The Israeli military said that on Friday it had sent fuel and food to the hospital and helped evacuate more than 100 patients and caregivers to other Gaza hospitals.

Abu Safiya, director of Kamal Adwan hospital, shows the damage from an Israeli attack inside the hospital in Beit Lahiya. Photograph: Reuters

Gaza’s health ministry has said the three main hospitals in northern Gaza – of which Kamal Adwan is one – are barely functioning and have been under repeated attack since Israel sent tanks into Beit Lahiya and nearby Beit Hanoun and Jabalia in October. The Israeli military claims the aim of the renewed assault on the north is to prevent Hamas fighters from regrouping there. But the IDF has attacked hospitals and shelters, with many civilians being killed by Israeli forces amid relentless attacks.

In other developments:

Israeli forces have carried out three consecutive attacks overnight on the Gaza Strip, killing at least 11 Palestinians, according to Al Jazeera, which said the military killed four people in two separate air raids in the so-called designated “safe zone” of al-Mawasi. Palestinian news agency Wafa is reporting that four Palestinian people were killed and three others injured after Israel bombed the new camp area northwest of the al-Nuseirat refugee camp.
The head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (Unrwa), Phillipe Lazzarani, said there has been in “escalation” in attacks over the past day, with more civlians reported killed and injured. In a post on X, he wrote: “Attacks on schools and hospitals have been commonplace. The world must not become numb.”
Jordan’s foreign minister Ayman Safadi is due to meet with Syria’s new leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, and “several Syrian officials”, later today in Damascus, Jordan’s foreign ministry said. Al-Sharaa, formerly known as Abu Mohammed al-Golani, led the Sunni Islamist rebels who swept into the Syrian capital earlier this month and forced Bashar-al Assad from power.

Key events

The Israeli parliament decided in late October to pass a law banning the UN aid agency for Palestinian refugees, Unrwa, from operating in the country. Unrwa said the new laws – due to come into effect within the next month – will cause the supply chain of aid to Gaza to “fall apart”, excepting an already dire humanitarian crisis, with widespread shortages of food, medicine and clean water across the Strip.

The UN agency for Palestinian Refugees, Unrwa, has been planning all year for winter in Gaza, but the aid it was able to get into the territory is “not even close to being enough for people,” Louise Wateridge, an agency spokesperson, said as many of the near 2 million Palestinians displaced by Israel’s war struggle to protect themselves from the wind, cold and rain.

Unrwa distributed 6,000 tents over the past four weeks in northern Gaza but was unable to get them to other parts of the Strip, including areas where there has been fighting. About 22,000 tents have been stuck in Jordan and 600,000 blankets and 33 truckloads of mattresses have been sitting in Egypt since the summer because the agency doesn’t have Israeli approval or a safe route to bring them into Gaza and because it had to prioritise desperately needed food aid, Wateridge said.

Many of the mattresses and blankets have since been looted or destroyed by the weather and rodents, she said.

The International Rescue Committee is struggling to bring in children’s winter clothing because there “are a lot of approvals to get from relevant authorities,” Dionne Wong, the organisation’s deputy director of programs for the occupied Palestinian territories, said.

“The ability for Palestinians to prepare for winter is essentially very limited,” she added.

Palestinian children struggle with cold and rainy weather as they try to survive in makeshift tents in Gaza City. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images

Reports of deadly Israeli airstrikes on al-Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza

As we mentioned in the opening summary, there have been reports this morning of deadly Israeli bombing on the al-Nuseirat refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip. Four people were reportedly killed in an Israeli attack on an area north of the camp. Here is a report from Al Jazeera, which says Israeli forces have surrounded a shelter in the camp for displaced civilians:

In the early hours of this morning, Israeli quadcopters and forces in armoured vehicles surrounded a school in the Nuseirat refugee camp that was filled with displaced civilians, impeding movement and preventing people from leaving the building.

They kept intermittently shooting using the quadcopters and heavy artillery. One person has already been killed there.

And just as a reminder, the vast majority of the displaced population is made up of civilians – women and children. They also make up the majority of casualties arriving at the hospitals.