‘DO you think they need any reason to attack this hospital? What kind of reason? They are liars! liars! They just want to destroy everything, everything, without any reason. They are liars!’
Dr Ahmed al-Moghrabi, head of the plastic surgery and burns department at Nasser Hospital in central Gaza, was responding to Zionist claims that when their forces charged into the hospital with guns, grenades, smoke bombs and dogs last Thursday, they they were acting on ‘intelligence’ that the bodies of some of the Israeli captives could be there.
‘It was like a Judgement Day,’ Doctor al-Moghrabi told Al Jazeera news.
He said that Israeli soldiers arrived in the facility at about 1.30am and ordered everyone to evacuate immediately. Half an hour later, they bombed the hospital’s third floor, where Dr al-Moghrabi was staying with his family, colleagues and patients.
He said that he managed to take his family away from the hospital along with some of his medical staff, while the rest of the staff were arrested, including a nurse whom he was separated from by Israeli soldiers at the gate of the hospital.
‘I ask the leaders of this world, how many videos do you have to see of us getting killed? Seeing this real genocide happening in front of your eyes and nothing – just silence?
‘Some patients managed to vacate the hospital and the rest of the patients actually remained at ITU and they may have passed away already. We managed to move some patients from one building to another building that night.
‘But they arrested all the other medical staff. My colleagues who remained at the hospital all of them were arrested.
‘I guess there were around 100. Beside me they took my nurse and they took my doctor, but their names are not mentioned in the list. Lots of medical staff actually have been arrested.
‘We have seen what they have done at Al Shifa, actually they attack all hospitals. Nasser Hospital is the main hospital here at Khan Younis in central Gaza.’
Dr Ashraf al-Qudra, the spokesman for the Ministry of Health in Gaza, said yesterday that the Israeli occupation has turned the Nasser Medical Complex into a military barracks and taken it out of service.
He said the Israeli occupation forces kept medical personnel for hours in the maternity building, handcuffed them, beat them, and stripped them of their clothes. He pointed out that the occupation army arrested 70 healthcare workers in the medical complex.
He said that there are now only 25 medical personnel left in the Nasser Medical Complex who are unable to handle cases in need of critical care. He warned that the occupation army has arrested the intensive care doctor and there is no doctor to follow up on critical cases.
He said that Israeli occupation forces have arrested dozens of immobile patients who are receiving treatment and placed them in military beds, loaded them onto trucks, and taken them to an unknown location, putting their lives at risk.
He added that the electricity has been cut off from the Nasser Medical Complex for three days, resulting in lack of oxygen for the patients. This has led to the death of seven patients so far, with fears of the death of dozens of critical cases.
