The director of Indonesia’s Beit Lahiya Hospital says 45 patients require “urgent surgery.”
Indonesian hospital in northern Gaza is ‘completely out of service’ due to lack of supplies and overwhelming number of patients amid Israeli assault on besieged territory, hospital director says , Atef al-Kahlout.
Images from Beit Lahiya hospital in the northern Gaza Strip show injured Palestinians lined up in the corridors of the facility and lying face down amid pools of blood.
“We can no longer offer services… we cannot offer any beds to patients,” al-Kahlout told Tel Aviv Tribune on Thursday.
Although the hospital has a capacity of 140 patients, al-Kahlout said that some 500 patients are currently inside the hospital.
He said 45 patients need “urgent surgery” and called on ambulances “not to bring any more injured people” to the facility due to lack of capacity.
He claims that the hospital services are “unable to do their job”. Health workers at the hospital spoke of a serious shortage of supplies.
“We don’t have any beds,” a health worker told Tel Aviv Tribune during a tour of the building.
“This person needs an intensive care unit,” he added, pointing to a young man lying on the ground, being treated by a nurse.
“And (here),” he said, pointing to another patient with a leg amputation, “we don’t have any medicine.”
“We are receiving wounded from Wadi Gaza to Beit Hanoon,” he said, “some have been here for 10 days.”
Nearly 30,000 Palestinians have been injured since Israel’s assault on Gaza began on October 7, after Hamas carried out a surprise attack in southern Israel, killing around 1,200 people, according to Israeli authorities.
More than 11,400 people were killed, including more than 4,600 children, during the Israeli attack on Gaza, according to Palestinian health authorities. Israel has also severely restricted supplies of water, food, electricity and fuel, with aid agencies warning of a humanitarian catastrophe in the enclave.
“Medical teams (at the Indonesian hospital) were forced to amputate some patients (body parts) due to rotting organs,” Tel Aviv Tribune’s Tareq Abu Azzoum reported from Khan Younis, adding that the hospital was unable to transfer the injured elsewhere. .
“All hospitals in Gaza City and the north have stopped functioning,” said director al-Kahlout.
The Indonesian hospital, located near the Jabalia refugee camp – the largest in Gaza – is also home to hundreds of displaced people seeking refuge there.
The area surrounding the hospital was repeatedly struck by Israeli forces, killing at least two civilians in strikes between October 7 and 28, according to Human Rights Watch.
The Israeli military claimed that the Indonesian hospital was used “to hide an underground command and control center” for Hamas. Palestinian officials and the Indonesian group that funds the hospital have rejected the claims.
Meanwhile, concern is growing for the thousands of civilians stuck at al-Shifa hospital, Gaza’s largest medical complex, amid an ongoing Israeli raid. Israel says the hospital houses a Hamas command center, a claim the group has denied.
White House spokesman John Kirby said Thursday that the United States was “confident in its own intelligence assessment” that Hamas was using the hospital “as a command and control node, and most likely also as a storage facility”.
On Thursday evening, the Israeli army released videos showing, it said, a Hamas tunnel shaft and a vehicle “containing a large number of weapons” discovered in Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital complex.