‘Darkest moment’ of war unfolds as Gaza reports two children killed in Israeli raid

The health ministry in ]Gaza said on Friday that two children died at the last functioning hospital in the territory’s north after Israeli fire hit oxygen equipment, while the military said that it was unaware of strikes in the area.

The Israeli military said its forces were operating around Kamal Adwan Hospital in the Jabalia refugee camp in north Gaza, where it launched a major operation earlier this month.

The operation sparked fresh concerns about the war’s civilian toll, with UN human rights chief Volker Turk saying the conflict’s “darkest moment” was unfolding in northern Gaza.

“Two children have died in the intensive care unit after the hospital’s generators failed and the oxygen station was targeted,” the health ministry said in a statement.

Israeli forces “are searching the hospital and firing within different departments, increasing the panic and anxiety”, it added.

The World Health Organization earlier said it had lost contact with staff at the hospital since Friday morning.

“This development is deeply disturbing given the number of patients being served and people sheltering there,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.

Gaza’s health ministry earlier said Israel’s forces “stormed” the hospital, “detaining hundreds of patients, medical staff and some displaced individuals from neighboring areas who sought refuge”.

Israel said it had allowed the transfer of 23 patients out of the hospital on Thursday night, which was confirmed by the WHO.

Rik Peeperkorn, the WHO representative for the Palestinian territories, said he witnessed “mayhem and chaos” at the hospital on Thursday.

At a checkpoint close to the hospital, the visiting WHO team saw “thousands of women and children leaving that area, walking, limping with their few belongings” towards Gaza City, he added.

‘Emptying area of Palestinians’

The UN human rights chief said that already “more than 150,000 people are reportedly dead, wounded or missing in Gaza” since the war broke out just over a year ago.

That number could “rise dramatically”, he said, warning that Israel’s actions in northern Gaza “risk emptying the area of all Palestinians”.

The Israeli military says the goal of the assault is to destroy the operational capabilities it says Hamas is trying to rebuild in the north.

Also in northern Gaza on Friday, Gaza’s civil defence agency said Israeli drone strikes killed 12 people waiting to receive aid near the Al-Shati refugee camp.

There was no immediate comment from the military.

In the south Gaza city of Khan Younis, nine children were among 14 people killed in an Israeli strike that hit the Fara family home, the civil defence agency’s Mahmoud Bassal said.

“The rocket fell next to us, and we were buried under the rubble,” Umm al-Ameer al-Fara, who survived the first strike, told AFP.

“My children and sister were killed.”

A separate strike in Khan Younis killed six people, Bassal said.

The Israeli military said “a number of terrorists were eliminated” in south Gaza.

Three journalists killed

Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack which triggered the Gaza war resulted in the deaths of 1,206 people in Israel, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.

Israel’s retaliatory campaign in Gaza has killed 42,847 people, the majority civilians, according to figures from the Gaza health ministry which the United Nations considers reliable.

Last month, after a nearly a year of rocket fire by the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah, a Hamas ally, Israel expanded its focus to Lebanon in a bid to secure its northern border.

At least 1,580 people have been killed in Lebanon since all-out war erupted on September 23, according to an AFP tally of Lebanese health ministry figures.

The Israeli military has announced the deaths of 32 soldiers since it began ground operations in Lebanon late last month.

On Friday, Lebanon accused Israel of a “deliberate” attack that killed three journalists.

Contacted by AFP, the Israeli military maintained it had targeted Hezbollah militants and said that “the incident is under review”.

Pro-Iran Lebanese television channel Al Mayadeen said cameraman Ghassan Najjar and broadcast engineer Mohammad Reda were killed in the strike on a journalists’ residence in the southern town of Hasbaya.

Another TV outlet, Al-Manar, run by Hezbollah, said video journalist Wissam Qassem was also killed in the strike on a bungalow located in a complex that several media organisations covering the war had rented out.

Border crossing hit

Journalists from other media organisations were sleeping nearby when the strike hit, in an area outside Hezbollah’s traditional strongholds.

“I woke up to the whistling sound of a missile and found my door burst open… I thought there was a fire,” Sky News Arabia correspondent Darine El Helwe told AFP.

Lebanon’s Prime Minister Najib Mikati said the “deliberate” attack was among the “war crimes committed by the Israeli enemy”.

Later on Friday, Lebanese state media said Israeli aircraft carried out at least eight strikes on Beirut’s southern suburbs, a Hezbollah stronghold.

AFPTV footage showed smoke rising from the area after Israel’s army issued an evacuation call.

In northern Israel meanwhile, falling shrapnel from rockets fired by Hezbollah killed two people in the Arab town of Majd al-Krum, a hospital and the Israeli army said.

Hezbollah had earlier said it sent “a large rocket salvo” targeting a nearby city.

The group also said it hit three Israeli tanks in clashes in two villages near the border.

The Israeli military meanwhile confirmed it struck a northern border crossing between Lebanon and Syria, accusing Hezbollah of moving weapons through it.

The UN refugee agency warned that the crossing had been the main escape route for people trying to flee the conflict in Lebanon.

“This is hindering and really putting at risk a main lifeline,” the UNHCR’s Rula Amin said.

More than half a million people, mostly Syrians, have fled to Syria since the conflict began last month, Lebanese authorities said.