One of the largest hospitals in southern Gaza is “now completely empty” after medical staff, patients and their families fled the facility following an Israeli evacuation order for parts of Khan Younis, World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.
At the same time, there are signs that many of the thousands of people who fled in fear of a new Israeli invasion of Khan Younis are slowly but surely returning, having been unable to find new shelter in the crowded parts of the Gaza Strip that are still accessible to them.
The European Hospital in Khan Younis was “one of the largest referral hospitals in the south,” Tedros said Tuesday on X. Most patients have been referred to the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis — a facility now operating “at full capacity” and facing shortages of essential drugs and medicines, Tedros said.
The rush to evacuate the hospital began Monday, when Israel issued evacuation orders for eastern parts of Khan Younis. Saleh al-Hams, the hospital’s head of nursing, previously told The Washington Post how news of the order flooded the phones of doctors and patients, prompting a rush to pack up and leave. In the past, Israeli soldiers have detained medical staff who stayed behind to care for patients.
Hams said the European hospital canceled all planned surgeries to evacuate its 400 patients. Some 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 the European hospital was not under their evacuation order and that there was “no intention” to evacuate it – but the facility had already been largely cleared of patients and staff.
This leaves a hospital shortage in the southern Gaza Strip – where many hospitals are no longer operational due to Israeli raids and strikes and shortages of medicine, staff, electricity and fuel – “at a time when access to health care is urgently needed,” Tedros said.
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For many in Khan Younis, this week’s evacuation order was just the latest in a long line of forced displacements. While the United Nations said up to a quarter of a million Palestinians were affected by the order, some have already returned to Khan Younis, saying there is nowhere left in Gaza to go.
Rewaa Saafin, 41, her husband Rami Saafin, 45, and their four children decided to return to their relatives’ home in Bani Suhaila neighbourhood, east of Khan Younis, after spending a night in a tent in Mawasi with other relatives.
“All the residents here say that the Israeli operation is over and what happened was just an aerial bombardment, so we 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 settle down in one place, obtain food and water, find bathrooms and get to know neighbors. “There are so many more details to life than just finding a place to stay,” she said.
Raed Hamad, 50, said he had no choice but to quickly return to his relative’s home in Qezan al-Najjar, south of Khan Younis. He said his wife had gone to stay with other relatives temporarily, while he and his sons “remained on the streets.”
“On Monday we took some essential items, but we couldn’t take everything because we didn’t know where we were going. Now we have returned despite the danger. There has been no official announcement of the end of the operation, but there has been no ground invasion and many residents have returned to the area,” he told The Post.
“You can’t say the area is safe and has facilities. 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 Gaza war wrote in a joint open letter published Tuesday night.
The letter’s signatories, who previously worked at the State Department, the White House, the Army and the U.S. Agency for International Development, among others, wrote that U.S. policies toward Israel and Gaza since the war and even before “have contributed to immense humanitarian harm” and have failed “to contribute to the peace and security of all in the Middle East, and especially Israel.”
“The administration’s policies in Gaza are a failure and a threat to US national security,” they wrote.
In recent months, the firings have provided a public glimpse into the growing level of internal dissent within government agencies over U.S. policy toward Israel since the October 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 proposed six measures that they said should be implemented to improve the situation, including that the U.S. government ineligible units of Israeli forces for U.S. aid under human rights law. They also called for an immediate increase in funding and support for humanitarian aid and reconstruction in Gaza, and for protection of nonviolent anti-war protests on U.S. college campuses.
Israel has carried out the largest land seizure in the occupied West Bank in more than three decadesanti-settlement watchdog Peace Now said in a statement Wednesday. The seizure of about five square miles of land in the Jordan Valley is the largest land expropriation 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 seize sovereignty over Palestinian-controlled areas. The latest land seizure was carried out in late June but was announced Wednesday, the group said.
Israeli police have forcibly 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 the legalization of five settler outposts and gave the green light to 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, deputy spokesman for the Foreign Ministry, saying at a news conference on Tuesday that “unilateral actions such as settlement expansion and legalization of outposts … are detrimental to a two-state solution.”
One person has been killed and another injured in a stabbing attack in the northern Israeli city of Karmielnear the border with Lebanon, Israeli police and medical authorities said Wednesday. The Galilee Medical Center said one of the victims was pronounced dead at its facility after failed attempts at resuscitation. Police said the attacker was “neutralized at the scene.” They added that “significant police presence” from the north was at the scene of the suspected terrorist attack.
At least 37,953 people have been killed and 87,266 wounded in Gaza since the war beganaccording to the Gaza Health Ministry, which makes no distinction between civilians and fighters but says the majority of the dead are women and children. Israel estimates that about 1,200 people were killed in the Hamas attack on October 7, including more than 300 soldiers, and it says 320 soldiers have been killed since the start of military operations in Gaza.
Kareem Fahim and Yasmeen Abutaleb contributed to this report.
