Israel Hamas war: Civil order 'breaks down' in Gaza as strikes damage hospital and death toll rises

The Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS) has announced that Israeli strikes on Sunday damaged sections in the packed Al-Quds Hospital in Gaza City, after receiving two phone calls from the Israeli military to evacuate.

A video the Red Crescent posted on X, formerly Twitter, of the hospital following the strikes shows rooms covered in debris and dust and the windows blown out. People covered their noses and mouths, panicking as they tried to leave the hospital with their children.

The PRCS-run hospital administration said that evacuating the hospital was impossible, as its hundreds of patients included children in incubators and wounded people in the intensive-care unit. In a statement, it said many of the 14,000 people seeking shelter there are Palestinians displaced by the ongoing Hamas-Israel war.

Israeli strikes targeted areas around the hospital throughout Sunday. The director-general of the World Health Organization has previously said that it would be “impossible” to evacuate hospitals without endangering people’s lives.

Hamas has reported "violent fighting" underway between its fighters and Israeli forces in the north of the Gaza Strip, where the Israeli army has been carrying out ground incursions since Friday evening.

“Our fighters are currently engaged in heavy combat using automatic and anti-tank weapons with the occupation forces carrying out an incursion into the northwest of Gaza,” said the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, in a statement.

The al-Qassam brigades also announced shortly beforehand that they had fired "mortar shells and rockets" at an Israeli military position in Erez, the main crossing point between the Palestinian territory and Israel, closed since the start of the war

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