Officials from the World Health Organization visited Al-Aqsa Hospital in central Gaza on Monday, where scores of people are being treated, including many from reported airstrikes on the Al-Maghazi refugee camp.
In response to a CNN inquiry Sunday, the IDF said it had received reports of an incident in the Al-Maghazi camp and was “reviewing the incident.”
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on X on Monday that staff at Al-Aqsa had reported receiving around 100 casualties. He said the WHO team at the facility had heard “harrowing accounts shared by health workers and victims of the suffering caused by the explosions.”
“One child had lost their whole family in the strike on the camp. A nurse at the hospital suffered the same loss, with his entire family killed,” Tedros said.
Tedros emphasized that the hospital is above capacity and warned that “many will not survive the wait.”
Sean Casey, a WHO emergency medical teams coordinator, described in a video posted by Tedros watching a 9-year-old boy die due to brain damage he suffered after being wounded by shrapnel in a building explosion. Casey said the only way Al-Aqsa hospital workers could help the child was to sedate him “to ease his suffering as he dies,” because the facility didn’t have the capacity to treat complex neurological cases. Casey said the operating theaters at Al-Aqsa were working 24 hours a day, yet people were still waiting hours and even days for treatment.
Dozens reported dead: At least 70 were killed in Al-Maghazi, the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza reported on Monday. At least 250 were killed and 500 injured in the past 24 hours in the central Gaza areas of Bureij, Nuseirat and Al Maghazi, the Hamas-run ministry added. CNN cannot independently verify the numbers released by the ministry in Gaza, as access to the enclave is limited and reliable numbers are hard to confirm amid the fighting.
Responding to a CNN inquiry about the deaths, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said Monday: “In response to Hamas’ barbaric attacks, the IDF is operating to dismantle Hamas military and administrative capabilities.”
Visits across the strip: WHO and its humanitarian partners visited several hospitals across Gaza over the weekend. Among them was the Al-Shifa hospital in the north, which Tedros called Sunday “a microcosm of the nightmare playing out across Gaza, where drastic shortages of medicines, food, power, water and – above all – safety imperil the population.”
Israel has focused a huge amount of attention on Gaza’s hospitals since it began its offensive in Gaza in October, claiming Hamas uses medical facilities for military purposes and showing what it says are underground Hamas tunnels below them, claims CNN cannot verify.
Al-Shifa, Gaza’s largest hospital, has been heavily damaged during the fighting. Israel alleged that Hamas had built a large-scale command and control center under the facility, a charge the militant group has denied. CNN last month visited an exposed tunnel shaft in the Al-Shifa hospital compound under IDF media escort. The tunnel shaft extended down farther than CNN’s reporter could see, especially in the meager light of headlamps.
