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Inside the emergency ward at Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City. September 27, 2025. (Screenshot of video by Abdel Qader Sabbah.)
GAZA CITY—Inside Al-Shifa’s crowded emergency department on Saturday, wounded men, women, and children lay on metal cots groaning in pain. Some were sprawled on the blood-caked floor bandaged with nothing more than rags. One man held an IV bag in his hand for an injured patient on the floor. A baby, barely a few months old, her face and legs bloodied and bruised was struggling to cling to life. On a nearby cot, a man wept as he embraced the body of a young girl, lying dead in jeans and a black top.
The situation at Al-Shifa hospital has become catastrophic as the Israeli military conducts a scorched earth ethnic cleansing campaign of Gaza City, with relentless aerial bombardment, repeated attacks on health care facilities, and Israeli tanks and troops advancing deeper into the city.
Scenes inside Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City. September 27, 2025. (Video by Abdel Qader Sabbah.)
Ambulances arrived in a steady stream outside carrying the dead and wounded. Paramedics brought corpses in body bags and placed them on the ground in a row outside the hospital entrance, one of them a young child charred beyond recognition and wrapped in a tarp. A large abandoned warehouse inside the facility was filled with metal cots and empty supply cabinets.
Hardly able to speak, Adam Mohammad Abu Karsh lay wounded on a bed in the hallway, untended to by the overwhelmed medical staff. “I went to the café by the sea because I wanted to take my family out. A tank started shelling at us. My cousin and I were injured. They brought me here to Al-Shifa Hospital,” Abu Karsh told Drop Site, wincing in pain. “There’s shrapnel inside me. The surgery was supposed to happen two hours ago,” he said before being overcome by the pain.
Outside in the streets around Al-Shifa, thick black smoke billowed in the air from nearby airstrikes as drones buzzed loudly overhead. Rubble and destroyed buildings surrounded the hospital alongside several tents and makeshift shelters built from cloth and tarp.
Yasmin Bakr with two of her wounded nephews inside Al-Shifa hospital. September 27, 2025. (Video by Abdel Qader Sabbah.)
Yasmin Bakr, a mother from Gaza City, fled to the south with her family where they lived on the street, unable to afford the high price of a tent. She returned to Gaza City after hearing that her sister’s house was bombed. “I came from the south and found a massacre at Al-Shifa—not healing [“shifa” means healing in Arabic],” Bakr told Drop Site from inside the hospital. “My sister’s daughter is in intensive care. My sister was martyred, her 16-year-old son and her other son. And these are her two older children,” she said, pointing to two young boys lying on a cot next to her, both in bandages. “There’s no treatment, no medicine, not even a pen to write with.”
Bakr said she is trying to take her injured family members to the south but can’t find an ambulance to transport them. “The situation here is extremely, extremely bad. And we’re afraid the Israelis will come in now and attack us. My sisters and my sister’s children and I are pleading with God to get us to the south. Just hand us the paper and provide us an ambulance to take them. This is death itself—we are living death here,” she said. “At any moment, they might storm the hospital. Within seconds or minutes, they’ll be upon us. Just now, they threatened the entire residential block behind Al-Shifa, where my family lives. We are fighting with death here. And when we try to go south, they shoot at us from behind.”
During its military offensive on Gaza City, which began in mid-August, Israel has repeatedly attacked hospitals and health care facilities, forcing a number to shut down completely, including the Al-Rantisi Children’s hospital, the Eye Hospital, and the Jordanian Field Hospital in the neighborhood of Tel al-Hawa. The UN recorded at least 17 Israeli attacks on or near health facilities in Gaza City over the last two weeks alone.
“Israel’s military attacks on and around hospitals in Gaza City are leaving sick and injured civilians with nowhere to turn to for lifesaving care, as escalating attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure are leading to countless casualties,” the UN Human Rights Office said in a statement on Monday. Only seven out of 13 hospitals in Gaza City are still operational, according to Gaza’s health ministry, and only barely. Meanwhile, the repeated attacks have rendered safe access to the medical facilities that are still functioning nearly impossible.
“The intensification of Israeli military attacks on civilian infrastructure in Gaza City, including direct attacks against hospitals and other health facilities, is dramatically impacting the already crumbling healthcare system in Gaza and worsening the dire humanitarian situation of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who remain trapped in Gaza City,” the UN Human Rights Office added.
On September 26, the aid group Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) announced it was suspending activities in Gaza City due to the escalating Israeli assault. “We have been left with no choice but to stop our activities, as our clinics are encircled by Israeli forces,” Jacob Granger, MSF Emergency Coordinator in Gaza, said in a statement. “This is the last thing we wanted, as the needs in Gaza City are enormous, with the most vulnerable people - infants in neo-natal care, those with severe injuries and life-threatening illnesses—unable to move and in grave danger.”
Israeli airstrikes near Al-Shifa hospital. September 27, 2025. (Video by Abdel Qader Sabbah.)
In what many feared was a prelude to an all-out attack on Al-Shifa, the Israeli military last week released aerial footage it said showed Hamas fighters shooting from inside the hospital.
Al-Shifa was once the largest hospital in Palestine. The Israeli army first raided Al-Shifa early on in the war, in mid-November 2023, after falsely claiming that Hamas ran a command and control center under the hospital. It withdrew during a temporary ceasefire 10 days later. In mid-March 2024, they invaded and occupied Al-Shifa for a second time arresting hundreds. At the beginning of April, staff returned to find the hospital completely destroyed—its buildings burnt and its wards and equipment severely damaged. Mass graves of hundreds of bodies were also discovered on the hospital grounds, some of victims “were allegedly older people, women and wounded, while others were found tied with their hands … tied and stripped of their clothes,” Ravina Shamdasani, the spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said at the time.
The health ministry, in coordination with local communities and international NGOs, succeeded in restoring partial functionality to the hospital in September 2024. Yet amid Israel’s latest assault, rumors swirled in the past few days that Al-Shifa had shut down again, prompting the health ministry to release a statement on Monday assuring that Al-Shifa was still providing medical services “despite the difficult current situation and the major challenges facing the health sector, especially in Gaza City.”
Now, Al-Shifa is completely overwhelmed with dozens of new casualties every day, severe shortages in supplies and medical staff, and the Israeli military is advancing closer.
“In general, the situation becomes more and more dangerous by the hour,” a paramedic with the PRCS told Drop Site on Saturday as he stood outside Al-Shifa’s main entrance. He asked to remain anonymous for security reasons. “Since this morning, we’ve retrieved martyrs and many injuries from the Ansar area, the Abbas area, and the port area—where the remaining civilians are gathered, those who haven’t been displaced because they don’t have the money or resources,” he said. “When we arrive to transport the wounded and martyrs to Al-Shifa Hospital, we find no nurses, no doctors, no staff to receive the cases. This is because they have fled due to the intense fear and nonstop bombardment of the northern areas in the northern part of the valley. They’ve all moved to the southern areas, because there is no stability or safety left here.”
Drop Site News Middle East Research Fellow Jawa Ahmad contributed to this report.
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