Israeli military descends on hospitals, shelters in northern Gaza Strip as Blinken arrives to push for ceasefire

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Israeli military forces besieged hospitals and shelters for displaced people in the northern Gaza Strip on Monday as they stepped up their operations, preventing critical aid from reaching civilians, residents and medics said.

Troops rounded up men and ordered women to leave the Jabalia historic refugee camp, they said. An Israeli airstrike on a house in Jabalia killed five people and wounded several others, medics said.

The U.N. Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA said Israeli authorities were preventing humanitarian missions from reaching areas in the north of the Palestinian enclave with critical supplies, including medicine and food.

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“People attempting to flee are getting killed, their bodies left on the street,” UNRWA head Philippe Lazzarini said on X.

Medics at the Indonesian Hospital told Reuters that Israeli troops stormed a school and detained the men before setting it ablaze. The fire reached hospital generators and caused a power outage, they added.

Health officials said they had refused orders by the Israeli army, which started a new incursion into the territory’s north over two weeks ago, to evacuate the three hospitals in the area or leave the patients unattended.

Later on Monday, Hussam Abu Safiya, director of Kamal Adwan Hospital said at least two critically wounded patients at the facility’s intensive care unit died because of the lack of medical supplies.

“The hospital’s blood units have run out completely... We are implementing a priority treatment method for patients. This is the reality,” said Abu Safiya in a video message to media outlets.

Troops remained outside the hospital but did not enter, they said. Medics at a second hospital, Kamal Adwan, reported heavy Israeli fire near the hospital at night.

“The army is burning the schools next to the hospital, and no one can enter or leave the hospital,” said one nurse at the Indonesian Hospital, who asked not to be named.

Palestinian health officials said at least 18 people had been killed in Jabalia and eight elsewhere in Gaza in Israeli strikes.

Israel has intensified its campaigns both in Gaza and Lebanon after the killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar last week had raised hopes of an opening for ceasefire talks to end more than a year of conflict.

It has vowed to eradicate Hamas, the group who formerly controlled Gaza and whose attack on Israel last year triggered the war, but in doing so has laid waste to much of the territory and killed tens of thousands of people. More than 1.9 million people have been left destitute and desperate for food.

“We are facing death by bombs, by thirst and hunger,” said Raed, a resident of Jabalia camp. “Jabalia is being wiped out and there is no witness to the crime, the world is blinding its eyes.”

Meanwhile, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken headed to the Middle East on Monday to make another push for an elusive ceasefire, seeking to kickstart negotiations to end the Gaza war and defuse the spillover conflict in Lebanon.

Blinken’s trip to the region, his 11th since the attack on Israel by the Palestinian militant group Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, that triggered the Gaza war, comes as Israel intensifies its military campaign in Gaza, and in Lebanon against the Iran-aligned Hezbollah militia.

Israel has raised the stakes by assassinating the leaders of Hezbollah in Lebanon, including its veteran secretary-general Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, and of Hamas in Gaza while showing no sign of reining in its ground and aerial offensives.

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Killing Sinwar of Hamas last week after a year-long search was a major victory for Israel. But its leaders say the war must go on until the Islamist group is eliminated as a military and security threat to Israel.

Iran and its allies have said Sinwar’s death in a gunbattle with Israeli soldiers in Gaza will strengthen their resolve.

Blinken will discuss with leaders in Israel and neighboring Arab states the importance of ending the war in Gaza, ways to chart a post-conflict plan for the Palestinian enclave, and how to reach a diplomatic solution to the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, the State Department said in a statement.

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U.S. envoy Amos Hochstein held talks with Lebanese officials in Beirut on Monday on conditions for a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah after Israel struck branches across Lebanon of a financial institution linked to the group.

He said that it was “not enough” for both sides to commit to U.N. resolution 1701, which ended the last round of conflict between Israel and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah in 2006 and which calls for southern Lebanon to be free of any troops or weapons other than those of the Lebanese state.

Israel carried out several new strikes in Beirut’s southern suburbs on Monday, including one outside the main government hospital in the city, according to a hospital source.

Hochstein said that neither Hezbollah nor Israel had adequately implemented the U.N. resolution, and that while it would be the basis for the end to current hostilities, the U.S. was seeking to determine what more needed to be done to make sure it was implemented “fairly, accurately and transparently.”

“We are working with government of Lebanon, the state of Lebanon, as well as the government of Israel to get to a formula that brings an end to this conflict once and for all,” he said.

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Israel has pursued a ground campaign over the past month after a year of border clashes touched off by Hezbollah rocket fire into Israel in support of Hamas in Gaza.

“Strike, strike, strike with planes and drones, and we don’t know who they are targeting and who will die each day,” said Micheline Jabbour, who works in a Beirut pastry shop.

The Israeli military said before its overnight attacks that it was targeting the Al-Qard Al-Hassan Association, a financial institution with over 30 outlets across Lebanon which the U.S. has said is used by Hezbollah to manage its finances.

There was no immediate statement from the organisation, Hezbollah or the Lebanese government.

Late Monday, Israel said it planned to carry out more strikes in Lebanon against the financial institution.

The Lebanese Sahel Hospital in Beirut’s southern suburbs was being evacuated following Israeli claims a Hezbollah cash bunker is located beneath it, hospital director Fadi Alameh said. Israel’s chief military spokesperson, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, said Israel would not strike the hospital but was monitoring the compound.

At least two people were killed and three others injured on Monday in an apparent guided missile attack on a car in the heart of the Syrian capital, Damascus, Syrian state television said, quoting a military source who attributed the attack to Israel.

Israel’s military said the strike killed the head of Hezbollah’s money transfers unit. Reuters could not independently verify the claim.

Lebanon’s health ministry said on Monday that the death toll since Israel’s offensive began had risen to 2,483, with 11,628 injured.

Fifty-nine people have been killed in northern Israel and the occupied Golan Heights over the same period, say Israeli authorities.

Israel’s campaign in Lebanon has driven 1.2 million people from their homes. It says its aim is to drive Hezbollah fighters from the border region so tens of thousands of Israelis can return to homes they were forced to flee over the past year due to Hezbollah cross-border fire in solidarity with Palestinians.

With a report from the Associated Press