A third of Gaza City has been damaged after a month of bombardments
Gaza’s hospitals have been extensively damaged in the two-year Israel-Hamas war, according to a satellite imagery and remote sensing expert
Satellite imagery shows the damage done by Hamas rockets, but determining where it came from is difficult as the rocket attacks continue.
On Oct. 7, Hamas-led militants stormed from the Gaza Strip into Israel, killed 1,400 people and took more than 240 hostages, according to Israeli officials.
The war has caused an estimated 27% to 35% of all buildings in the northern part of the Territory to be damaged. Throughout the Gaza Strip, they estimate that between 13% and 18% of all structures have been destroyed or damaged, a range of 38,000 to 51,500 buildings.
“It’s just steadily increasing,” said Van Den Hoek, a satellite imagery and remote sensing expert who has been studying this imagery since the war’s onset. “There’s broad damage in areas where people live — cities, refugee camps.”
The narrow strip of land between Egypt and Israel is called the Gaza Strip. Its footprint is roughly the same as Philadelphia’s, though with half a million more people, many packed into concrete high-rises up and down the coast.
It is not known how many residents remain in the northern part of the Gaza Strip. The UN estimates that around 160,000 people are housed in 57 schools in northern Gaza by the UNRWA, an agency that helps Palestinians. Hospitals in Gaza City and northern Gaza are caring for 117,000 people who have been displaced. The World Health Organization said on Oct. 29 that “evacuation of hospitals is impossible without endangering patients’ lives.”
The Israeli military has denied targeting Gaza’s hospitals. According to witnesses and international aid groups, there are continuing Israeli airstrikes on hospitals in the northern part of Gaza.
The Health Ministry said on Saturday that bombs killed at least 45 people in the Al-Maghazi refugee camp. The Israeli military is investigating whether or not it was in the area at that time. Nearby, The Associated Press reports that Israeli airstrikes struck near Bureij refugee camp, killing at least 13.
Hospitals in Gaza have suffered repeated damage in the Israel-Hamas war, and their protected status is a source of fierce disagreement between Israelis and Palestinians.
“Hospitals have specific protections under international law and there should be the utmost care to protect those facilities,” said Wesam Ahmad, with the Palestinian human rights group Al-Haq, which is based in the West Bank.
“Hamas is cynically using hospitals as a shield for its underground terror complex,” said Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, Israel’s chief military spokesperson.
Attorney Pnina Sharvit Baruch, who was a top legal adviser to Israeli military operations, said that this strategy is a win-win strategy for Hamas.
Israel could either stop attacking the military infrastructure of Hamas or it could. Or Israel does not attack. Civilians get killed and the whole world puts pressure on Israel,” said Sharvit Baruch, now with the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv.
The Israeli military has been causing great harm to civilians with their bombs in crowded city blocks. Bashi said that it was predictable.
Israeli military actions against Hamas in Gaza: An Israeli lawyer’s view on the attack at Shifa Hospital in the late 1990s
Medical units can not be used to try to shield military objectives from attack according to a 1977 addition to international rules of warfare.
And any retaliation would have to be proportionate. Lawyers say a single attacker wouldn’t give the army the ability to destroy the entire building.
During times of relative calm, the former Israeli military lawyer worked for years with commanders as they prepared target lists.
A bomb went off in the parking lot of the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City. Palestinians said hundreds of people were killed by an airstrike. Israel denied involvement, saying the cause was an errant rocket fired by Palestinian militants. The evidence pointed to a Palestinian rocket, and the U.S. and other intelligence agencies investigated.
At least some of the casualties were among the thousands of Palestinians who are camping out on the grounds of Shifa and other hospitals, hoping they will provide at least a bit more safety than other places in Gaza, a territory under almost round-the-clock bombardment.
Sari Bashi said Human Rights Watch is investigating this attack on Shifa hospital, noting Israel said the Hamas fighters were leaving the hospital, not attacking from it. She claims that Israel did not give her warning that it was striking.
“These are the kinds of rules that all the nations in the world have agreed to,” she said. The Israeli military is not accepting those rules, even on its own statements.
In addition, Hamas has always targeted Israeli civilians, from scores of suicide bombings in the 1990s and early 2000s, to its Oct. 7 massacre in southern Israel.
During the past one month, the group has fired thousands of rockets into Israeli cities and held about a quarter of a million people hostage, most of them civilians.
