An Israeli airstrike destroyed parts of a hospital in Gaza City early on Sunday, its civil defence agency said, as Israel seized a corridor further south in the war-battered Palestinian territory and said it planned to expand its military offensive.
There were no reports of casualties in the strike and the Israeli military told Agence France-Presse it was looking into the incident.
The civil defence agency in the Hamas-run territory said Israel’s air force targeted a building of the Al-Ahli hospital, also known as the Baptist or Ahli Arab hospital, in Gaza City after midnight.
The airstrike came “minutes after the [Israeli] army’s warning to evacuate this building of patients, the injured and their companions”, the agency said in a statement. “The bombing led to the destruction of the surgery building and the oxygen generation station for the intensive care units,” it added.
Hospitals, protected under international humanitarian law, have repeatedly been hit by Israeli strikes in the Gaza Strip since the start of the war between Israel and Palestinian militant group Hamas on October 7, 2023.
On Saturday, Israel announced it has completed construction of a new security corridor that cuts off the southern city of Rafah from the rest of Gaza, as the military said it would soon expand operations in most of the small coastal territory. Palestinians were further squeezed into shrinking areas of land.
“Soon, IDF [Israel Defense Forces] operations will intensify and expand to other areas throughout most of Gaza, and you will need to evacuate the combat zones,” defence minister Israel Katz said in a statement.
“The IDF has now completed its takeover of the Morag axis, which crosses Gaza between Rafah and Khan Yunis, turning the entire area between the Philadelphi Route [along the border with Egypt] and Morag into part of the Israeli security zone,” Katz said.
The statement urged Palestinians to stand up and remove Hamas and release the remaining hostages, saying: “This is the only way to stop the war.” There was no immediate Hamas response.
Israeli troops were deployed last week to the new security corridor referred to as Morag, the name of a Jewish settlement that once stood between Rafah and Khan Younis, after the army ordered sweeping evacuations covering most of Rafah, indicating it could soon launch another major ground operation.
In a statement, the Rafah municipality called Israel’s actions a “flagrant breach of international legitimacy”.
Israel has vowed to seize large parts of Gaza to pressure Hamas to release the remaining 59 hostages, 24 of them believed to be alive, and accept proposed new ceasefire terms.
Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has also imposed a month-long blockade on food, fuel and humanitarian aid that has left the territory’s roughly 2 million Palestinians facing acute shortages as supplies dwindle — a tactic that rights groups say is a war crime.
Israel has claimed that enough supplies entered Gaza during the two-month ceasefire that it shattered last month. Aid groups have disputed that.
Netanyahu has said Morag would be “a second Philadelphi corridor,” referring to the Gaza side of the border with Egypt farther south, which has been under Israeli control since May 2024. Israel has also reasserted control of the Netzarim corridor, which cuts off Gaza’s northern third from the rest of the territory.
The corridors, coupled with a buffer zone that Israel has razed and expanded, give it more than 50% control of the territory.
Katz said Palestinians interested in “voluntarily” relocating to other countries would be able to as part of a proposal by Donald Trump. Palestinians have rejected the proposal and expressed their determination to remain in their homeland.
Trump and Israeli officials have not said how they would respond if Palestinians refuse to leave Gaza. But Human Rights Watch and other groups say the plan would amount to “ethnic cleansing” — the forcible relocation of the civilian population of an ethnic group from a geographic area.
Many Palestinians have been crowding into squalid tent camps or the rubble of their previous homes, often displacing multiple times in response to Israel’s evacuation orders since the Hamas-led attack on 7 Octover, 2023, killed some 1,200 people, many of them civilians, and sparked the war.
Israel on Saturday ordered the evacuation of areas east of Khan Younis ahead of an attack. Military spokesperson Avichay Adraee added that militants had fired rockets into Israel from these areas.
Hamas has said the bombardment poses risks to the hostages as well. On Saturday, the family of the last living American held in Gaza responded to the release of a new video showing Edan Alexander speaking under duress.
“When you sit down to mark Passover, remember that this is not a holiday of freedom as long as Edan and the other 58 hostages are not home,” the family said in a statement.
Families and supporters again rallied in Tel Aviv for a deal to bring everyone home.
The 7 October 2023 Hamas attack on southern Israel, in which Israel says 1,200 people, the majority of them civilians, were killed and a further 250 taken captive, was the trigger for the conflict in Gaza, the worst war between Israel and the Palestinians in more than 70 years of fighting.
Israel’s retaliatory military campaign has killed more than 50,000 people, the majority of them civilians, according to the territory’s health ministry.
With Associated Press and Agence France-Presse
