Hundreds flee Al Shifa hospital as Israel strikes kill over 100 in Gaza

Patients, staff and displaced people fled Gaza's largest hospital on Saturday, with one describing a panicked and chaotic evacuation as Israeli forces searched and face-scanned men among the evacuees and took some away.

Israel's military has been searching Shifa Hospital in Gaza City for traces of a Hamas command center that it alleges was located under the building - a claim Hamas and the hospital staff deny. The evacuation left behind only Israeli forces and a skeleton crew to care for those too sick to move.

"We left at gunpoint," Mahmoud Abu Auf told The Associated Press by phone after he and his family left the crowded hospital that under Israeli encirclement had run out of supplies for newborn babies and other patients. "Tanks and snipers were everywhere inside and outside." He said he saw Israeli forces detain three men.

A small number of health workers were left behind to care for those too sick to move, health officials said.

The exodus came the day internet and phone service was restored to the Gaza Strip, ending a telecommunications outage that forced the United Nations to shut down critical aid deliveries.

A health ministry official in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip said more than 80 people were killed on Saturday in twin Israeli strikes on the Jabalia refugee camp.

"At least 50 people" were killed in a dawn strike on the UN-run Al-Fakhura school in the camp, the ministry official told AFP, sparking condemnation from the United Nations' humanitarian chief.