Israeli forces shoot at Gaza fishing port
Israeli gunboats have fired heavy machine guns towards a fisherman’s port in Gaza City, as well as towards the Shati camp in northern Gaza, our colleagues at Al Jazeera Arabic are reporting.
It comes after Israeli forces shot at fishermen working off the coast of Gaza’s Rafah yesterday, killing one and injuring another.
Palestinians in Rafah fear ‘unspeakable humanitarian catastrophe’
It was a bloody night in the Gaza Strip, specifically in the southern part here.
As we have been reporting, fighter jets targeted a house in Rafah’s Saudi neighbourhood. At least six Palestinians have now been reported killed, including four children. In Nuseirat camp, at last eight Palestinians were killed and 30 others wounded from an air strike targeting a house. According to witnesses, that attack also damaged seven neighbouring houses.
Within the last hour, there have been more air strikes targeting a residential building in Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza. Ambulances have rushed to the scene to recover people who have been injured.
Across the territory, Palestinians are following all the latest political developments regarding regional mediators’ efforts to get Israel and Hamas to get to a swap deal and ceasefire agreement.
Palestinians believe that if these negotiations collapse, there’s going to be an expansion of the fighting to reach Rafah, where people have nowhere else left to go. They believe that if the Israeli military starts a ground invasion here, it will bring unspeakable humanitarian catastrophe.
Mourners stand near corpses of an adult and a child killed in overnight Israeli bombardment, in the front of the morgue of a hospital in Rafah, Saturday
Eight children among victims of latest Rafah, Nuseirat strikes
The death toll from overnight Israeli air strikes on Rafah and Nuseirat camp has now risen to 15, with eight killed in Rafah and seven killed in Nuseirat, according to a report by our colleagues on the ground.
Most of those killed were children.
The killings of the eight children add to a toll of more than 14,500 children killed by Israel during its war on Gaza, representing some 42 percent of all deaths.
A man carries the shrouded body of a child killed in overnight Israeli bombardment, in the front of the morgue of a hospital in Rafah, Saturday
Surgeon describes harrowing injuries at Gaza hospital
Dr Junaid Sultan, a vascular surgeon who recently returned from a two-week mission at the European Gaza Hospital in southern Gaza, has described to Al Jazeera the severe injuries he treated at the strained health facility.
Most patients rushed to the hospital after Israeli military attacks suffered from four types of injuries: gunshots, blast wounds, shrapnel or burns, said Sultan.
- Gunshot wounds, he said, usually hit major blood vessels in the victim’s knees, arms, shoulders, neck or spine, often leading to crippling disabilities if the patient survives.
- Blast injuries are “notorious” for completely fracturing major bones, Sultan said. He often saw blast victims entering the facility with “dangling limbs”, forcing them to undergo amputations.
- Shrapnel injuries, Sultan said, can penetrate “any part of the body”, and were often lodged in the victim’s thighs, abdomen, chest or neck.
Treating these injuries is complicated by the severe lack of medical supplies and medication at the hospital, Sultan said, which other smaller field hospitals also rely on for supplies
On top of gunshot, blast and shrapnel wounds, Palestinians in Gaza are suffering from severe malnutrition that makes it more difficult for their wounds to heal, Dr Sultan told Al Jazeera. “I have seen patients who are emaciated because of a lack of nutrition and proper food, said Sultan, adding that some were “hardly having a meal once a week”.
“This is another factor contributing to the high risk of complications in these patients. They have wounds which are not healing due to a lack of antibodies and a lack of nutrition.
“It’s at a massive scale,” he said.
“If anything happens to this hospital, it will be devastating to the whole healthcare infrastructure of Gaza,” said Sultan.
