Later on Friday, the three nearby hospitals — al-Nasr, al-Rantisi and the Gaza Eye Hospital — that had been surrounded by the fighting were evacuated after being given a route by the IDF.
“We were carrying white flags and when we walked out, we passed by the tanks, I was meters away from one,” said Baqr Qaoud, director of the Nasr Hospital. He said some 4,000 people left and he was the last doctor to walk out of the hospital. He watched tanks close in on his hospital as he departed.
The Israeli military said the east side of al-Shifa Hospital “remains open” and denied allegations of assaults on the hospital.
Abu Mughaisib said medical workers at al-Nasr pediatric hospital had to leave babies in incubators behind as they evacuate southward.
A Gaza hospital evacuated
The nurse in the besieged hospital was caring for five fragile babies. Infants, born premature, their parents’ whereabouts after a month of war unknown.
the Israel Defense Forces were calling and texting the doctors, urging them to leave.
But ambulances couldn’t safely reach al-Nasr to transport the wounded, and doctors refused to leave the facility without their patients.
The five premature babies were particularly vulnerable. They needed oxygen, and medication administered at regular intervals. There were no portable respirators or incubators to transport them.
Then the IDF delivered an ultimatum, al-Nasr director Bakr Qaoud told The Washington Post: Get out or be bombarded.
The nurse, a Palestinian man who works with Paris-based Doctors Without Borders, saw no choice. He assessed his charges and picked up the strongest one — the baby he thought likeliest to bear a temporary cut to his oxygen supply. He left the other four on their breathing machines, reluctantly, and with his wife, their children and the one baby, headed south.
An official at the adjacent al-Rantisi pediatric cancer center seemed to receive an assurance that ambulances would retrieve patients from both al-Rantisi and al-Nasr. In a telephone conversation with the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, an arm of Israel’s defense ministry, the al-Rantisi official requested ambulances. In a
recording of that call released by the Israel Defense Forces, a senior COGAT officer responds in Arabic: “No problem.”
Qaoud, too, said there was “coordination with the Red Cross and Israeli army that we will go out and then these cases will be later evacuated to another hospital that was safe.”
Two weeks later, the pause in hostilities allowed a Gazan journalist to venture into the hospital. In the neonatal intensive care unit, Mohammed Balousha made the awful discovery.
The decomposing bodies of the four babies.
COGAT spokeswoman Shani Sasson told The Post that Israeli forces neither directed al-Nasr’s staff to evacuate nor operated inside the facility.
