The sound of tanks roaming the streets outside Kamal Adwan Hospital woke everyone up, already on edge after months of direct Israeli attacks.
Then came the loudspeakers ordering everyone to evacuate the sick, wounded, medical staff and displaced people seeking shelter, early Friday morning.
It was clear that the medical complex in Beit Lahia, in northern Gaza, was about to face an Israeli airstrike, as so many others had before it, as Israel appeared to be systematically destroying all health care facilities in Gaza.
It did not matter that the hospital was, according to the World Health Organization, the last major health facility operating in northern Gaza, an area that Israel has suffocatingly besieged and destroyed in its ongoing war.
Nor was it a refuge for hundreds of Palestinians whose homes were destroyed by Israel and who had nowhere else to go.
Numbers written on their chests
At around 6 a.m., patient Izzat al-Aswad heard Israeli forces summon Dr. Hussam Abu Safia, the hospital director, over loudspeakers.
Dr. Abu Safia returned and told the people in the hospital that they had been ordered to evacuate. Abu Safia himself, a rare voice exposing Israel’s actions at the hospital, was detained by Israel, which refused to release him despite calls from the United Nations, humanitarian NGOs and international health organizations to do so.
Shortly afterward, Aswad said, Israeli soldiers ordered all the men to strip to their underwear to allow them to leave.
The men, trembling and afraid, many of them wounded, Aswad said by phone, were ordered to walk to an Israeli checkpoint about two hours away.
At the checkpoint, they gave their full names and had their photographs taken.
A soldier then wrote a number on their chest and neck indicating that they had been searched.
Some of the men were taken for questioning.
“They beat me and the men around me,” Aswad said. “They beat injured people like me directly on our wounds.” Izzat al-Aswad was severely beaten by Israeli soldiers who forced him to strip to his underwear (Abdel Hakim Abu Riash/Al Jazeera)
Shorouk al-Rantisi, 30, a nurse at Kamal Adwan’s laboratory department, was among the women taken out of the hospital.
The women were told to walk to the same checkpoint, which was located in a school, and then waited for hours in the cold.
“We could hear the men being beaten and tortured. It was unbearable.”
Then the searches began.
“The soldiers were dragging the women by their heads towards the checkpoint,” al-Rantisi said. “(They shouted at us and demanded that we take off our headscarves. Those who refused were severely beaten.”
“The first girl called in for inspection was asked to strip. When she refused, one of the soldiers beat her and forced her to lift her clothes.
“A soldier pulled me by the head, then another soldier ordered me to lift the top of my clothes, then the bottom, and checked my identity,” she said.
Abandoned Patients
Rantisi said the women were eventually taken, left at the roundabout and told they could not return to Beit Lahia.
“How could we leave the patients and abandon them? None of us ever thought about leaving until we had to,” she said by phone.
Israel had been attacking the hospital for weeks before the strike.
“The hospital and its courtyard were being bombed relentlessly, day and night, as if it were normal,” Aswad said.
“The quadcopters fired at anyone who moved in the courtyard… They targeted the generators and water tanks, while the medical staff struggled to care for the patients.”
Aswad said the night before the strike was “terrifying,” with Israeli attacks everywhere, including the Safir building.
Eyewitnesses said there were about 50 people there, including nurses from the hospital. “No one was able to rescue them or retrieve their bodies, they are still there,” he said.
The lions and the men who were not questioned were released after a full day of abuse and humiliation.
“The soldiers ordered us to go west of Gaza City and never come back,” he said. “We walked through the destruction and rubble, and we were cold, until people came to meet us near Gaza City, and offered us help and blankets.”
“Betrayed” and “Abandoned”
Rantisi said the Israeli raid exacerbated the “global silence and abandonment” that Palestinians in Gaza have faced throughout more than a year of relentless Israeli attacks that have killed more than 45,000 people.
“For more than 60 days of continuous bombardment – quadcopters, artillery, targeted strikes on generators,” she said.
“Dr. Hussam’s pleas were not answered until the hospital was stormed and emptied. How can the world allow this to happen?”
“I feel like we have all been betrayed,” said Fadi Atawneh, 32, bitterly by phone.
“I was injured, so I stayed in the hospital, hoping that the World Health Organization would evacuate us or protect us, but that never happened,” Atawneh said.
“I feel deeply saddened by what happened to us and by the fate of Dr. Abu Safia. We have been left alone to face this aggression.”
