Footage verified by Al Jazeera’s Sanad verification unit shows dozens of Palestinians fleeing Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital after Israeli forces launched an operation in the area. Our Al Jazeera Arabic colleagues reported that Israeli forces opened fire inside the medical complex in northern Gaza City, causing deaths and injuries.

Earlier, we reported that the Israeli military announced conducting a “precise operation” at al-Shifa, claiming Hamas fighters had regrouped there.

الجيش الإسرائيلي يجبر مئات العائلات على النزوح من مجمع الشفاء الطبي غربي مدينة غزة #حرب_غزة #فيديو pic.twitter.com/yxK9KQi2my

— الجزيرة فلسطين (@AJA_Palestine) March 18, 2024

Israeli drones firing at people living near al-Shifa: Report

Fire breaks out at al-Shifa amid Israeli bombing: Report

Gaza media office says Israeli troops, tanks, drones active at al-Shifa

_{Palestinians inspect al-Shifa Hospital which was raided by Israeli forces during its ground operation in Gaza City, November 25, 2023}

‘This might be my last video’: Palestinian journalist describes ‘catastrophic’ situation at al-Shifa

Gaza Health Ministry reports deaths, injuries at al-Shifa

Al Jazeera Media Network has released the following statement about the beating and arrest of its journalist Ismail al-Ghoul, who was covering the siege of al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City:

Today, Monday, 18 March 2024, Israeli occupation forces attacked Al Jazeera Arabic correspondent Ismail Alghoul in Gaza whilst he was performing his journalistic duties. Following the attack, he was arrested, and the broadcast vehicle along with cameras and equipment was destroyed.

Al Jazeera Media Network demands the immediate release of its correspondent and the other journalists who were detained alongside him, and holds the occupation forces fully responsible for their safety.

Ismail al-Ghoul was arrested this morning inside Al-Shifa Hospital along with a number of journalists while covering the Israeli occupation forces’ attack on the hospital. According to eyewitnesses, Ismail was severely beaten and taken to an unknown location.

The Network emphasises that this targeting serves as an intimidation tactic against journalists to deter them from reporting the horrific crimes committed by the occupation forces against innocent civilians in Gaza.

The targeting of Ismail al-Ghoul is part of a series of systematic attacks on Al Jazeera by the occupation authorities, which included the assassination of Shireen Abu Akleh, Samer Abudaqa, and Hamza al-Dahdouh, the bombing of its office in Gaza, the deliberate targeting of a number of its journalists and their family members, and the arrest and intimidation of its crews.

Al Jazeera condemns the ongoing crimes committed by the Israeli occupation forces against journalists and media professionals in Gaza and renews its call for an immediate halt to these horrific attacks.

Scott Griffen, the deputy director of the International Press Institute (IPI), says the organisation is “deeply alarmed” by reports that Al Jazeera Arabic correspondent Ismail al-Ghoul has been beaten and detained by Israeli forces inside al-Shifa Hospital.

“We’re calling for his immediate release and precise information about his wellbeing at this moment,” Grieffen told Al Jazeera. Al-Ghoul’s detention, he said, “lays bare the risks that all journalists” face in Gaza, as Israel has killed “scores” of them during the war with “almost no accountability”.

“This is not only threatening the lives of journalists who are on the ground trying to tell the story, but it is preventing audiences around the world from accessing the truth,” said Griffen.

As of today, at least 95 journalists and media workers – the overwhelming majority of them Palestinians – have been killed since the start of the war in October, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has condemned the detention of Al Jazeera Arabic correspondent Ismail al-Ghoul and his team by the Israeli army at al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza.

“Journalists play an essential role in a war. They are the eyes and the ears that we need to document what’s happening and with every journalist killed, with every journalist arrested, our ability to understand what’s happening in Gaza diminishes significantly,” Jodie Ginsberg, chief executive officer of the CPJ, told Al Jazeera. “This is the worst conflict for journalists that the Committee to Protect Journalists has ever documented, and the situation is simply getting worse.”

She added that the attacks on media vehicles and equipment at al-Shifa Hospital “looks like a deliberate attempt to prevent [the] assault on the hospital being documented” and that “there is a history of Israel targeting media facilities”.

Israeli forces have previously targeted Al Jazeera crews

This is a repeated violation being committed by the Israeli troops, who have previously targeted Al Jazeera crews.

Samer Abudaqa and Hamza al-Dahdouh have been killed, while several Al Jazeera journalists have been targeted while doing their jobs.

Right now, there are growing calls for the immediate release of Al Jazeera Arabic correspondent Ismail al-Ghoul.

In a statement released on X, Reporters Without Borders, also known by its French name Reporters sans frontières (RSF), has called the arrest of Al Jazeera Arabic’s Ismail al-Ghoul “part of Israel’s ongoing crackdown on the press”.

“RSF demands the release of [Al Jazeera] correspondent Ismail a-Ghoul, arrested by the army at Al-Shifa hospital”, the statement reads, saying that he was beaten and his equipment destroyed.

We’ve been reporting all day on intense fighting at and near al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. The Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s armed wing, has reported on its Telegram channel that its fighters have been engaged in “fierce clashes” with Israeli forces in the area since dawn.

The group said it targeted “a number of Zionist vehicles, causing deaths and injuries among their ranks”.

The military says in a statement that its soldiers have killed 20 Palestinian fighters in Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital and apprehended dozens of suspected fighters.

“Twenty terrorists have been eliminated at the al-Shifa Hospital thus far in various engagements, and dozens of apprehended suspects are currently in questioning,” the army said.

The Wafa news agency is reporting an Israeli attack on the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza. It said Israeli forces bombed a house there, killing at least nine Palestinians and wounding several others.

The agency also reported Israeli attacks in the Tal Al Hawa neighbourhood in Gaza City.

In Gaza City and Jabalia, large crowds of people gathered to receive food aid on Sunday, as humanitarian convoys managed to reach northern Gaza without incident for the first time in four months.

Humanitarian agencies have warned in recent weeks that northern Gaza is on the brink of famine due to repeated Israeli attacks and restrictions on aid convoys attempting to reach the area.

Israel has killed more than 13,000 children in Gaza since October 7 while others are suffering from severe malnutrition and do not “even have the energy to cry”, says the UN’s children’s agency, UNICEF.

“Thousands more have been injured or we can’t even determine where they are. They may be stuck under rubble… We haven’t seen that rate of death among children in almost any other conflict in the world,” UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell told the CBS News network.

Malnutrition among children is spreading fast and reaching devastating and unprecedented levels in the Gaza Strip due to the wide-reaching impacts of the war and ongoing restrictions on aid delivery, the UN’s children’s agency said.

• North Gaza: 31 percent of children under the age of two (one in every three children) suffer from acute malnutrition, a staggering escalation from 15.6 percent in January.
• Central Gaza: 28 percent of children have acute malnutrition, more than 10 percent of which have severe wasting.
• South Gaza: Acute malnourishment of kids has doubled to 10 percent.

The alarming figure comes as the World Food Programme warns famine is “imminent” in the northern part of the enclave, with it expected to fully set in between now and May. The only way to reverse the trend, warns Philippe Lazzarini, head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), is to open more land crossings and “flood” the enclave with food.

“We are engaged in a race against the clock,” Lazzarini said at a Cairo news conference.

Nour Shawaf, a regional policy adviser at Oxfam, has described the situation in the Gaza Strip as catastrophic after the UN-backed report said there is already an imminent famine in northern Gaza and a risk of famine across the entire bombarded and besieged territory.

“This is all man-made,” she told Al Jazeera from Beirut. “This is all a result of the continued bombardment by Israel and displacement of Palestinians across the Strip, and the result of using starvation as a weapon of war.

“As long as we do not see a ceasefire in place that would allow humanitarian operations to scale up to deliver aid into Gaza and northern Gaza specifically, with an exponential type of increase of this type of assistance, then we are going to be seeing a very catastrophic scenario unfolding in front of our eyes as the world watches,” Shawaf said.

She added that Oxfam was looking into seven constraints to humanitarian access that Israel has deliberately put in place to ensure that humanitarian operations are blocked.

Melanie Ward, the CEO of Medical Aid for Palestinians, says the warnings about imminent famine in Gaza mean nothing if they do not inspire action. “Over the last five months, we’ve consistently issued warnings about how severe things were getting in Gaza,” Ward, whose group provides medical services in the enclave, told Al Jazeera. “Nothing has been done … in fact it’s only gotten worse,” she said.

“What’s worse is that it’s a really simple problem to solve. If Israel would only let food aid in, we could stop the starvation immediately.” The fact that 19 aid trucks recently made it into northern Gaza, Ward said, “shows that it’s possible”.

Responding to recent warnings by EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell and other leaders about the impending famine, Ward said it’s time to move beyond “warm words” that have so far accomplished nothing. “We saw Borrell and others say ‘starvation is being used as a weapon of war’. My question is: What are they going to do about it? What are they going to do to avert this famine?”

The looming famine in Gaza is a “shocking”, “unprecedented” development that Israeli policies are contributing to, says Sam Duerden, a team lead for the aid group International Rescue Committee’s operations in the occupied Palestinian territory.

“Children are starving due to an entirely man-made and preventable crisis,” Duerden said in a statement. “There is no excuse.” To reverse Gaza’s descent into famine, he called for:

• An immediate ceasefire
• Israel to end its “arbitrary denial of food, water, fuel, and essential medicine” into the enclave
• All parties to facilitate the “rapid and unimpeded passage of humanitarian relief from all possible land routes”.

Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the UN Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA), says he has been denied entry into Gaza by Israeli authorities.

“UNRWA has by far the largest presence among all humanitarian organisations in Gaza. My visit today was supposed to coordinate & improve the humanitarian response,” Lazzarini wrote on X, noting that the Israeli authorities’ move happened on the day that new data on famine in Gaza was released.

“This man-made starvation under our watch is a stain on our collective humanity. Too much time was wasted, all land crossings must open now. Famine can be averted with political will.”

Israeli forces have carried out a series of arrests across the occupied West Bank, the Wafa news agency reports. They include:

• Two men arrested in the village of Tal, south of Nablus
• Two men arrested in the town of Arura, northwest of Ramallah
• Two men arrested in the town of as-Samu, south of Hebron
• A man arrested in the suburb of Thinnabeh, east of Tulkarem
• A man arrested in the town of Attil, northeast of Tulkarem

Earlier, Wafa reported that 20 Palestinians were arrested near the town of al-Issawiya, northeast of occupied East Jerusalem.

At least 35 Palestinians have been detained by Israeli forces across the occupied West Bank in raids overnight and this morning, the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society said.

Among those arrested is Rawda Abu Ajmiyeh, a Palestinian former prisoner who was released in the exchange deal between Israel and Hamas in November. Abu Ajmiyeh was detained from her home in the Dheisheh refugee camp south of Bethlehem, along with two men.

At least 13 of the 240 Palestinians released in November have been rearrested, with 11 of them remaining in Israeli custody, the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society said. The majority of the arrests took place in the occupied East Jerusalem neighbourhood of al-Issawiya.

The Islamic Resistance in Iraq, a coalition of pro-Iran armed groups, says it launched a drone attack at an Israeli airbase in the occupied Golan Heights.

There were no immediate reports of the attack by the Israeli military or in Israeli media, but the Jordanian army earlier announced suspicious aerial movements from an unknown source along its border with Syria.

In a statement, the Islamic Resistance said its attack against the Israeli airbase was in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza and that it would “double” such attacks against “enemy strongholds” during Ramadan.

It comes after the Islamic Resistance, on March 11, claimed to target Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport with explosive drones, although no reports confirmed the airport was ever hit. The Islamic Resistance has regularly waged attacks on US military bases in Iraq during the war on Gaza.

An overnight Israeli air raid hit a Hezbollah “military structure and observation post” in the southern border village of Ramyah, the Israeli military has said on Telegram. There were no immediate reports of casualties.

Ulrich Brueckner, a professor of European Studies at Stanford University, has criticised Israel’s war strategy as “short sighted”, overlooking its enduring humanitarian consequences or establishing a clear post-war plan.

As a result, the war could bring Israel a “political loss that will last much longer than any potential victory it can claim”, Brueckner told Al Jazeera.

Brueckner added that neither the US nor Europe would likely be able to exert much influence on Netanyahu, who is fighting for “political survival”. While the US theoretically has more leverage, he said, President Biden is caught between “strong supporters of the Palestinians and a very strong Jewish lobbying group during an election year”.

Hundreds of activists in Spain have held a demonstration in a show of solidarity with Palestinians enduring Israeli attacks in Gaza. One protester, Bernardo Atxaga, told Al Jazeera he believes the Israeli attacks, which have killed at least 31,923 people, amount to a “genocide” against Palestinians.

“The international press may talk of war, but I know dictionaries well. For me this is not war, it is genocide,” Atxaga said.