JERUSALEM: Israeli forces said on Thursday they had raided the biggest functioning hospital in Gaza as footage showed chaos, shouting and gunfire in dark corridors filled with dust and smoke. Israel’s military called the raid on Nasser Hospital “precise and limited” and said it was based on information that Hamas militants were hiding and had kept hostages in the facility, with some bodies of captives possibly there. Hamas called that lies.
Health authorities in the Hamas-run Palestinian enclave said Israel had forced out displaced people and families of medical staff sheltering in Nasser Hospital.
Some 2,000 Palestinians arrived in the southern border city of Rafah overnight while others pushed north to Deir Al-Balah in central Gaza, they said.
Israel’s air and ground offensive since October 7 has since devastated tiny, crowded Gaza, killing 28,663 people and forcing nearly all its more than 2 million inhabitants from their homes.
Fighting at the hospital comes as Israel faces growing international pressure to show restraint, after vowing to press its offensive into Rafah, the last relatively safe place in Gaza.
Israel has also claimed that its air strike in the Lebanese city of Nabatieh on Wednesday night had killed a senior commander of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Force, his deputy and a third fighter.
Meanwhile, Hezbollah said Israel would “pay the price” for killing 10 civilians, including five children, in southern Lebanon, the deadliest day for Lebanese civilians in four months of hostilities across the Lebanese-Israeli border.
Hezbollah said three of its fighters had been killed but did not identify any as commanders, which it has done in the past. Seven of the civilians were killed in Nabatieh late on Wednesday when a rare Israeli strike on the southern city hit a multi-storey building, sources in Lebanon said. The dead were from the same extended family, and included three children.