Fate of biggest hospital still functioning in Gaza at risk

Israel ramps up attacks in Khan Younis, sending patients and residents fleeing

Israeli forces advancing into the southern Gaza Strip's main city pounded areas near the biggest hospital still functioning in the enclave on Jan 18, sending patients and residents fleeing a battle they feared would lay the city to waste.

The heaviest battle of 2024 so far is under way in Khan Younis, sheltering the hundreds of thousands who fled the north earlier in the war, now in its fourth month.

Residents described heavy fighting and intense bombardment in the north and east of the city and, for the first time, in the west, where they said tanks had advanced to carry out a raid before withdrawing.

The Israeli military said a brigade in Khan Younis, now operating further south than troops had ventured before, had "eliminated dozens of terrorists in close-quarters combat and with the assistance of tank fire and air support".

The charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), which has doctors at the city's Nasser Hospital, said patients and displaced people sheltering there were fleeing in panic.

In Rafah, further south, where more than half of Gaza's 2.3 million people are now crammed into a small city by the Egyptian border, 16 bodies were laid out on the bloodstained cobbles outside a morgue, most in white shrouds, a few in body bags.

A branch of the Zameli family had been wiped out in a strike that destroyed their home overnight.

Half the bundles were tiny, holding the bodies of small children.