Gaza hospital ‘completely empty’ after Israeli order in Khan Younis

The European Hospital in Khan Younis was “one of the largest referral hospitals in the south,” Tedros said Tuesday on X. Most of its patients have been referred to Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis — a facility that is now “at full capacity” and is facing shortages of essential drugs and medicines, according to Tedros.

The scramble to evacuate the hospital began Monday, when Israel issued evacuation orders for eastern parts of Khan Younis. Saleh al-Hams, who heads the hospital’s nursing department, previously told The Washington Post how news of the order flooded the phones of doctors and patients, prompting a scramble to pack up and leave. In the past, Israeli soldiers have detained medical staff who stayed behind to look after patients.

Hams said the European Hospital canceled all scheduled surgeries to evacuate its 400 patients. Some of the patients walked to Nasser Hospital, while others “were dragged in hospital beds … by their families” and others were taken there in ambulances.

Israeli authorities later said that the European Hospital was not subject to their evacuation order and that there was “no intention” to evacuate it — but the facility had already largely been emptied of its patients and staff.

This leaves the southern Gaza Strip — where many of the hospitals are no longer operational because of Israeli raids and strikes and shortages of medicines, staff, electricity and fuel — one more hospital short, “at a time when access to health care is urgently needed,” said Tedros.

For many in Khan Younis, this week’s evacuation order was only the latest in a long string of forced displacements. Though the United Nations said up to a quarter-million Palestinians were affected by the order, some have already returned to Khan Younis, saying there is nowhere left in Gaza for them to go.

Rewaa Saafin, 41, her husband Rami Saafin, 45, and their four children decided to return to their relatives’ house in the Bani Suhaila neighborhood, east of Khan Younis, after spending one night in a tent in Mawasi with other relatives.

“All the residents here say that the Israeli operation has ended, and what happened was only an air bombardment, so we have returned. More importantly, we have no place to stay in another area,” Rewaa Saafin told The Post.

She described “a constant state of displacement” that has made it impossible for her family to firmly settle in any one place, secure food and water, find bathrooms and get to know neighbors. “Life involves many details beyond just finding a place to stay,” she said.

Raed Hamad, 50, said he had no choice but to quickly return to his relative’s house in Qezan al-Najjar, south of Khan Younis. He said his wife went to stay temporarily with other relatives, while he and his sons “stayed on the street.”

“On Monday, we took some essential items with us, but we couldn’t take everything because we didn’t know where we would go. Now we have returned despite the danger. There has been no official announcement of the end of the operation, but there is no ground invasion, and many residents have returned to the area,” he told The Post.

“It can’t be said that the area is safe and has services. Every place in Gaza is damaged, but here we have a place to sleep,” he added.

The humanitarian crisis in Gaza is “catastrophic and rapidly escalating,” 12 former U.S. government and military officials who resigned over the Biden administration’s handling of the war in Gaza wrote in a joint open letter published late Tuesday.

The signatories of the letter, who previously worked at the State Department, White House, Army and U.S. Agency for International Development among others, wrote that U.S. policy toward Israel and Gaza since the war and even before has “contributed to immense humanitarian harm” and failed “to contribute to the peace and safety of all in the Middle East, and particularly that of Israel.”

“The Administration’s policy in Gaza is a failure and a threat to U.S. national security,” they wrote.

Over the past few months, the resignations have provided a public view into the heightened levels of internal dissent within government institutions over U.S. policy toward Israel since the Oct. 7 massacre by Hamas. One of the former staffers who signed the open letter, Lily Greenberg Call, cited her Jewish upbringing and ties to Israel in her own resignation letter in May.

The signatories laid out six measures they said should be implemented to improve the situation, including for the U.S. government to declare units of Israeli forces ineligible for U.S. aid under human rights law. They also called for immediately increasing funding and support for humanitarian aid and reconstruction in Gaza, and protecting nonviolent protests against the war on U.S. college campuses.

An Israeli airstrike on a car in southern Lebanon killed a Hezbollah commander on Wednesday, according to the militant group and Lebanon’s state-run news agency. The commander, identified as Mohammed Naamah Nasser, was the third senior Hezbollah operative killed since the group began trading fire with Israel at the outset of the Gaza war. The attack, outside the city of Tyre, threatened to escalate tensions between Hezbollah and Israel as U.S. officials say they are trying to mediate between the two parties to prevent an all-out war.

Israel has carried out its largest seizure of land in the occupied West Bank in more than three decades, the anti-settlement watchdog group Peace Now said in a statement Wednesday. The seizure of approximately five square miles of land in the Jordan Valley amounts to the largest land appropriation since the early 1990s, according to the group’s data. More than nine other square miles of West Bank territory had been declared “state land” this year alone, a method Israeli governments have used to wrest sovereignty over Palestinian-controlled lands. The latest land seizure was carried out in late June, but announced Wednesday, the group said.

Israeli police forcefully removed an illegal settlement in the occupied West Bank on Wednesday, leading to a confrontation with Jewish settlers, according to local media. Israel’s security cabinet last week approved legalizing five settler outposts and greenlighted plans to build thousands of new homes for settlers elsewhere in the West Bank, according to the Times of Israel. Washington condemned the move, with Vedant Patel, principal deputy spokesman for the State Department, saying Tuesday during a news briefing that “unilateral actions like settlement expansion and legalization of outposts … are detrimental to a two-state solution.”

One person was killed and another injured in a stabbing attack in the northern Israeli city of Karmiel, near the border with Lebanon, Israeli police and medical authorities said Wednesday. The Galilee Medical Center said one of the victims was pronounced dead in its facility after failed attempts at resuscitation. Police said the attacker was “neutralized at the scene.” They added that “significant police forces” from the north were at the scene of the suspected terrorist attack.

At least 37,953 people have been killed and 87,266 injured in Gaza since the war started, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants but says the majority of the dead are women and children. Israel estimates that about 1,200 people were killed in Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, including more than 300 soldiers, and it says 320 soldiers have been killed since the start of its military operations in Gaza.

Kareem Fahim and Yasmeen Abutaleb contributed to this report.