Israeli tanks cut off two hospitals in new storming of Gaza’s Khan Younis

DE Online Desk
Israeli tanks storming southern Gaza’s main city reached the gates of two hospitals on Monday, cutting residents off from trauma care as the bloodiest fighting of the new year tore through areas sheltering hundreds of thousands of displaced.
Residents said bombardment from air, land and sea was the most intense in southern Gaza since the war began in October, as Israeli tanks surged across Khan Younis from the east into the western areas close to the Mediterranean coast.
Video images filmed from afar showed scattered civilians wandering a ghost city, crowded with tents with abandoned laundry flapping on lines, as gunfire rattled and columns of smoke rose into the sky.
Israel launched an offensive last week to capture Khan Younis, which it now says is the principal headquarters of the Hamas militants responsible for the Oct. 7 attacks on southern Israel that killed 1,200 people, according to Israeli tallies.
The newest phase of the war has brought fighting deep into the last corners of the enclave now packed with those who fled bombardment that has killed at least 25,295 people since Oct. 7, Gaza health authorities said in an update on Monday.
The majority of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents are now penned into two towns, Deir al-Balah and Rafah, just north and south of Khan Younis respectively. They are crammed into public buildings and vast camps of tents made from plastic sheets lashed to makeshift wooden frames.
The Palestinian Red Crescent said it had lost all contact with its staff at its Al-Amal Hospital in Khan Younis, main base for the rescue agency, where Israeli tanks were parked outside.
Further west, advancing Israeli tanks had reached the al-Mawasi district near the Mediterranean Coast for the first time, cutting off its Al-Khair hospital and stationing themselves around nearby Al-Aqsa university, heaving with thousands of displaced civilians.
At Nasser Hospital, the only major hospital still accessible in Khan Younis and the largest still functioning in Gaza, witnesses said the trauma ward was overwehelmed with wounded being treated on the floor and in hallways.
Health officials said least 20 dead bodies had arrived there overnight and they expected many more later, as tanks on the streets made it hard for rescuers to recover them.
“The occupation has overnight launched an unprecedented ground and air war on Khan Younis. People are trapped near Mawasi, people are trapped in Al-Amal hospital, in Al-Aqsa University. People are carrying the dead and wounded on donkey carts,” said a medic inside Nasser Hospital who declined to give his name for fear of reprisals.
Gaza health ministry spokesperson Ashraf Al-Qidra said in a statement that dozens of dead and wounded were trapped in areas targeted by Israeli troops.
“The Israeli occupation is preventing ambulance vehicles from moving to recover bodies of martyrs and the wounded from western Khan Younis,” he said.