By BY BBC
The mother of one of the premature babies moved to Egypt from Gaza had to leave without saying goodbye to her three other children.
“I didn’t even get a chance to hug them because I couldn’t leave my daughter in this state. I didn’t say goodbye to them,” Lobna al-Saik told the Reuters news agency.
Her youngest daughter is one of 28 premature babies who were evacuated from al-Shifa hospital on Sunday so they could receive medical treatment in Egypt.
Al-Saik was living in the north of the Gaza Strip but evacuated to the south after being told to leave.
Her premature daughter was kept on oxygen because she has breathing problems.
“It never occurred to me that the hospital would be targeted and the children would have to go through what they went through,” al-Saik said.
“My message to the world is ‘enough’. These are innocent children,” al-Saik said.
As we’ve been reporting, the BBC has verified video of Israeli tanks close to the Indonesian Hospital in northern Gaza, while the director of the hospital has told the BBC that at least 10 people have been killed in an Israeli air strike there.
The hospital was built by the organisation MER-C, with funding from Indonesian donors, and opened in 2016 with 110 beds. It is in northern Gaza, close to the Jabalia refugee camp.
There have been mixed messages in recent days about whether it has been continuing to function.
On Thursday, the hospital’s director said it had shut down and about 45 patients who urgently needed surgery had been left in the reception area.
But on Saturday, the World Health Organization said that, with Gaza’s largest hospital, al-Shifa, no longer able to admit patients, the injured and sick were “now being directed to the seriously overwhelmed and barely functioning Indonesian hospital”.
Images and videos from the past week have shown patients being treated on the floor and a baby being treated with a manual resuscitator.
On 5 November, the Israeli military said the hospital was “being used by Hamas to hide an underground command and control centre” – and that it had been built on top of existing “terror infrastructures”.
Both MER-C and the Indonesian foreign ministry have denied the claims, with the ministry saying the hospital was built “entirely for humanitarian purposes and to serve the medical needs of the Palestinian people in Gaza”.
The head of MER-C said on Friday the facility was in “dire condition” and that Israel’s claims about it were made to “justify attacks to come”.
