‘Too many Palestinians killed’: US, France up the pressure on Israel as hospitals hit

Gaza: Israel is facing mounting international pressure, including from the United States and France, to do more to protect Palestinian civilians in Gaza as the death toll rises and fighting intensifies near and around hospitals.

The number of Palestinians killed by Israel’s bombardment of the coastal enclave in the past five weeks rose above 11,000, according to Gaza health officials on Saturday.

Palestinians wounded in the Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip are brought to a treatment room of Al Aqsa Hospital on Saturday (AEDT).Credit: AP

At the same time a spokesperson for Israel’s Foreign Ministry said the death toll from the October 7 Hamas attack on southern Israeli communities had been revised down to about 1200 from a previous government estimate of 1400. About 240 were taken hostage by Hamas, while 39 soldiers have been killed in combat since.

Israel spokesperson Lior Haiat said in a written statement the revised death count, which included foreigners, “is not a final number. It [is] an updated estimate. It might change when [they] identify all the bodies”. He did not provide a reason for the revision. “Around 1200 is the official number of victims of the October 7 massacre,” he said.

More than 100 United Nations employees have been killed in the conflict, the UN Palestinian refugee agency said on Friday, making it the deadliest conflict ever for the UN in such a short period of time. The Committee to Protect Journalists said at least 40 journalists and media workers were among the dead – 35 Palestinian, four Israeli, and one Lebanese. Three were reported missing.

An Israeli airstrike in the Gaza Strip is seen from southern Israel on Friday.Credit: AP

In his strongest comments to date on civilian suffering, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken denounced the number of Palestinians killed.  On a visit to India he welcomed the four-hour humanitarian Israeli pauses that the White House announced the day before, but told reporters more action was needed to protect Gaza’s civilians.

“Far too many Palestinians have been killed; far too many have suffered these past weeks”.

But Blinken reaffirmed American support for Israel’s campaign to ensure that Gaza can no longer be used “as a platform for launching terrorism”.

French President Emmanuel Macron, in a BBC interview, said Israel must stop bombing Gaza and killing civilians. France, he said, “clearly condemns” the “terrorist” actions of Hamas, but that while recognising Israel’s right to protect itself, “we do urge them to stop this bombing” in Gaza.

In response, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said world leaders should be condemning Hamas, and not Israel. “These crimes that Hamas [is] committing today in Gaza will be committed tomorrow in Paris, New York and anywhere in the world,” Netanyahu said.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrives to speak to the media in New Delhi, India.Credit: AP

Israel has said that Hamas militants would exploit a truce to regroup if there were a ceasefire.

Fighting intensified overnight into Saturday near Gaza City’s overcrowded hospitals, which Palestinian officials said were hit by explosions and gunfire.

“Israel is now launching a war on Gaza City hospitals,” said Mohammad Abu Selmeyah, director of Al Shifa hospital.

He said later that at least 25 people were killed in Israeli strikes on Al-Buraq school in Gaza City, where people whose homes had been destroyed were sheltering.

Gaza officials said missiles also landed in a courtyard of Shifa, the enclave’s biggest hospital, in the early hours of Friday, damaged the Indonesian Hospital and reportedly set fire to the Nasser Rantissi paediatric cancer hospital.

The World Health Organisation said colleagues had reported “intense violence” at Shifa and “significant bombardment” on Rantissi.

Israel’s military said later that a misfired projectile launched by Palestinian militants in Gaza had hit Shifa.

The hospitals, filled with displaced people as well as patients and medical staff, are in northern Gaza, where Israel says the Hamas militants are concentrated.

Israeli government spokesperson Eylon Levy said the Hamas headquarters was in Shifa hospital’s basement, which meant the facility could lose its protected status and become a legitimate target. Israel says Hamas hides weapons in tunnels under hospitals, charges Hamas denies.

World Health Organisation Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said health workers the group was in contact with at Shifa had been forced to leave in search of safety.

“Many of the thousands sheltering at the hospital are forced to evacuate due to security risks, while many still remain there,” Tedros wrote on social media.

Palestinians injured in Israeli air raids arrive at Nasser Medical Hospital in Khan Yunis.Credit: Getty

‘No one is safe’

Gaza Health Ministry spokesman Ashraf al-Qidra said Israel had bombed Shifa hospital buildings five times.

“One Palestinian was killed and several were wounded in the early morning attack,” he said by phone. Videos verified by Reuters showed scenes of panic and people covered in blood.

Qidra said clearing out the hospitals was impossible.

“We are talking about 45 babies in incubators, 52 children in intensive care units, hundreds of wounded and patients, and tens of thousands of displaced people,” he said.

Israeli tanks had taken up positions around the Nasser Rantissi hospital as well as the al-Quds hospital, medical staff said earlier.

The Palestinian Red Cross said Israeli forces were shooting at al-Quds hospital, and there were violent clashes, with one person killed and 28 wounded, most of them children.

“Israel is now launching a war on Gaza City hospitals,” Mohammad Abu Selmeyah, director of Shifa hospital, which was struck by missiles early on Friday, told Reuters.

Israeli army spokesperson Lieutenant Colonel Richard Hecht said at a briefing the army “does not fire on hospitals. If we see Hamas terrorists firing from hospitals we’ll do what we need to do. We’re aware of the sensitivity [of hospitals], but again, if we see Hamas terrorists, we’ll kill them.”

Israel’s UN ambassador Gilad Erdan said his country had created a taskforce to establish hospitals in southern Gaza. On October 12, Israel ordered some 1.1 million people in Gaza to move south ahead of its ground invasion.

The Indonesian military announced it would send a hospital ship to the waters near Gaza to help victims of the conflict. Defence minister and presidential candidate Prabowo Subianto said he was coordinating with the government of Egypt. “We are on coordination with some parties out there and when we receive green light, the ship hospital will be dispatched,” he said.

Indonesian military spokesman said the ship called Dr Radjiman Wedyodiningrat 992, completed in late 2022, would be sent.

Saudi Arabia is due to host an extraordinary joint Islamic-Arab summit in Riyadh on Saturday , the Saudi Foreign Ministry said. The joint meeting would “be held in response to the exceptional circumstances taking place in the Palestinian Gaza Strip”. It said countries felt the need to “come out with a unified collective position”.

An Israeli tank manoeuvres inside the Gaza Strip.Credit: AP

Sirens sounded in Tel Aviv and surrounding areas to alert people to Hamas rocket fire. Medics reported two women in Tel Aviv suffered shrapnel wounds from a salvo. The armed wing of Hamas said on Friday it was still firing rockets and shells into Israel.

Gaza’s hospitals were struggling to cope, even before the conflict closed in on them, with medical supplies, clean water and fuel to power generators running out.

Smoke and flares rise over Gaza City during an Israeli strike in the Gaza Strip, as seen from southern Israel.Credit: AP

In the wake of the blast at Shifa hospital, many people fled. Ayman al-Masri, wounded early in the war, told Reuters he had taken shelter there with his mother and sister 10 days ago.

“We want a truce, we want a solution, a political solution. Tens of our children are killed every day,” he said.

Reuters, with Karuni Rompies

More coverage of the Hamas-Israel conflict

• Cascading violence: Tremors from the Hamas attacks and Israel’s response have reached far beyond the border. But what would all-out war in the Middle East look like?
• The human cost: Hamas’ massacre in Israel has traumatised - and hardened - survivors. And in Gaza, neighbourhoods have become ghost cities.
• “Hamas metro”: Inside the labyrinthine network of underground tunnels, which the Palestinian militant group has commanded beneath war-ravaged Gaza for 16 years. The covert corridors have long provided essential channels for the movement of weapons and armed combatants.
• What is Hezbollah?: As fears of the conflict expanding beyond Israel and Hamas steadily rise, all eyes are on the militant group and political party that controls southern Lebanon and has been designated internationally as a terrorist group. How did it form and what does Iran have to do with it?

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