The courtyard in front of the Kamal Adwan hospital in Beit Lahiya, in the north of the Gaza Strip, has become nothing more than shapeless furrowed land, a field of ruins where garbage, the remains of tents, cinder blocks and concrete bars mingle. On Saturday, December 16, after the withdrawal of the Israeli army, Anas al-Sharif, a reporter for the Qatari channel Al Jazeera, filmed Palestinians wandering around looking for the remains of their loved ones. "I don't know how to describe this scene to you. Bodies by the dozens. The bulldozers ran over them and left," exclaims the journalist, moving his lens over mounds of beige earth from which pieces of corpses emerged. A little further on, a man is crying. He had come to look for his wounded son who had taken refuge in this hospital, but couldn't find him.
Another Palestinian pointed to the destroyed pharmacy and the hospital administration offices, which were no longer standing. "The bulldozers buried the displaced and the sick alive," he said to the camera. Le Monde was unable to independently verify these claims. Gaza is still under siege and cut off from the world, and foreign journalists are denied access. But the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) relayed the Al Jazeera reporter's accusations in its report on Saturday, December 16. "According to initial reports by media and video footage, an Israeli military bulldozer flattened the tents of a number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) outside the hospital, killing and wounding an unconfirmed number of people," wrote the UN agency.
"I think there was shouting. We're not sure, because we weren't allowed to look. Anyone who moved was shot," said Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, the hospital's head of pediatrics, at a press conference outside the hospital, which was interrupted by heavy sniper fire on Monday.
The assault by Israeli soldiers on the hospital, justified by the military's general staff as being necessary for hunting down members of Hamas there, began on December 12 and lasted four days. It was preceded by a week of siege and bombardments. The hospital was the only one still in service at the northern tip of the Gaza Strip. The hospital director, Dr. Ahmed al-Kahlout, was arrested along with dozens of other men. According to Abu Safiya, some of the staff were beaten and shot at. "Five of them were wounded," the doctor reported.
Israeli soldiers first called on "displaced families and sick people aged 16 to 65 to get out of the hospital," Dr. al-Kahlout told a Reuters camera. "The next day, they started searching the hospital. They took away members of the medical teams and the wounded, one by one, for questioning." Pointing to a spot outside the hospital, he added: "There were six bodies there, and a 60-year-old patient had died, upstairs. They took them. I don't know what they did with them."
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