TG Staff
The Guardian / April 13, 2025
Al-Ahli Hospital struck, says Gaza’s civil defence agency, amid widening Israeli offensive that has cut off access to southern city of Rafah.
An Israeli airstrike destroyed parts of a hospital in Gaza City early on Sunday as Israel continued its military offensive in the war-battered Palestinian territory and cut off access to the southern city of Rafah.
The Palestinian civil defence agency said Israel’s air force fired missiles at Al-Ahli Hospital, also known as the Baptist or Ahli Arab Hospital. It is the only hospital still functioning in Gaza City after the destruction of medical facilities in the northern area of the strip.
There were no reports of casualties in the strike. The agency said the bombing “led to the destruction of the surgery building and the oxygen generation station for the intensive care units”.
In a statement confirming the strike, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) alleged the hospital was a command and control centre used by the Palestinian militant group Hamas, which controls Gaza.
“The compound was used by Hamas terrorists to plan and execute terror attacks against Israeli civilians and IDF troops,” the military said in its statement.
According to a statement by the Palestinian civil defence agency, doctors and patients were given only a few minutes’ warning to evacuate the building before the strike. Video footage circulating online appeared to show people fleeing the building as it was engulfed in smoke and flames. The IDF said it had taken steps to “mitigate harm to civilians” and issued “advance warnings”.
The Gaza health ministry called it a “horrific crime” and said Israel was deliberately destroying Gaza’s healthcare system.
Hospitals, protected under international humanitarian law, have repeatedly been hit by Israeli strikes in the Gaza Strip since the start of the war between Israel and Hamas on 7 October 2023. The Israeli military has accused Hamas of embedding military operations in hospitals and civilian buildings, which the group has denied.
On Saturday Israel said it had completed its takeover of a new “security zone” that cut off the southern city of Rafah from the rest of Gaza, part of a wider Israeli operation to establish and expand a security buffer zone across southernmost Gaza where Palestinians are banned from entering.
The defence minister, Israel Katz, announced that Israel’s military had seized the corridor between Rafah and Khan Younis, which he referred to as the “Morag axis”, giving Israel effective control of the Rafah. Evacuation orders were also given for several neighbourhoods in Khan Younis on Saturday night.
The prewar population of Rafah was about 275,000, which earlier this year expanded to an estimated 1.4 million as Palestinians were displaced from north and central Gaza by Israeli security operations.
But since the breakdown of the ceasefire with Hamas in March, Israel has resumed its offensive with vigour and vowed to seize large parts of Gaza to pressure Hamas to release the remaining hostages and accept new ceasefire terms.
Last week Israel issued sweeping evacuation orders for most of Rafah, once again displacing swathes of Gaza’s population of 2 million people into shrinking areas of land, where most are living in squalid tents or the rubble of their homes. In a statement, the Rafah municipality called Israel’s actions a “flagrant breach of international legitimacy”.
The establishment of Israeli control over crucial corridors in the south and northern areas of Gaza, as well as the expanding security buffer zone, means it now controls over 50% of the strip.
Katz vowed to continue to expand operations “vigorously” across the rest of Gaza. “IDF activity will soon expand strongly to additional locations throughout most of Gaza and you will have to evacuate the fighting zones,” he said.
The statement by Katz urged Palestinians to stand up and remove Hamas and release the remaining hostages, saying: “This is the only way to stop the war.” There was no immediate Hamas response.
Katz said Palestinians interested in “voluntarily” relocating to other countries would be able to as part of a proposal by Donald Trump, the US president. Palestinians have rejected the proposal and expressed their determination to remain in their homeland, while Human Rights Watch and other groups say the plan would amount to “ethnic cleansing”.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israeli government has imposed a month-long blockade on food, fuel and humanitarian aid that has left people in Gaza facing acute shortages of food, water and medicines as supplies dwindle, a tactic that rights groups say amounts to a war crime. Israel has claimed that enough supplies have entered Gaza since the breakdown of the ceasefire, a claim widely disputed by aid groups.
Since the Hamas-led attack on 7 October 2023 on southern Israel, which killed about 1,200 people, Israel’s retaliatory military campaign in Gaza has killed more than 50,000 people, most of them civilians, according to the territory’s health ministry.
