In a U.S.-assisted, Israeli military operation, the Israeli army killed at least 270 Palestinian civilian in Gaza, with over 700 injured, according to the Government Media Office in the besieged region.
The Israeli assaults —one of the war’s most severe— targeted Nuseirat and Deir el-Balah by air, land, and sea on Saturday, with doctors describing the situation inside Al-Aqsa Hospital as a “complete bloodbath.”
The European Union condemned the attack in Nuseirat as “a massacre,” while one medic remarked that the inside of Al-Aqsa Hospital “looks like a slaughterhouse.”
Doctors Without Borders (MSF) indicated that the hospitals are “overwhelmed” in the aftermath of these strikes.
Al Jazeera’s Hind Khoudary said the situation is tense, with terrified people on the street not knowing where to turn. “There are explosions happening every minute. Ambulances are transferring the wounded to the hospital where we are trapped. It’s chaos inside the hospital. There are children among the wounded,” she said.
“The images and videos that I’ve received show patients lying everywhere in pools of blood … their limbs have been blown off,” she told Al Jazeera. “That is what a massacre looks like,” she added. “It means parents running around caring for their children who have blood running from their head trying to find a medic to treat them. But it’s so chaotic and there’s so many patients that is vastly outnumbering the healthcare ability to care for them.”
In a brief statement, the Israeli military announced that its forces were “targeting terrorist infrastructure in the area of Nuseirat.” They later reported that four captives had been rescued during the operation in Nuseirat. The military stated that these individuals, taken into Gaza following the Hamas-led attack in southern Israel on October 7, were in “good medical condition.” In addition, “An American cell in Israel supported the efforts to rescue four Israeli hostages, working with Israeli forces on the operation,” an American official told CNN.
Meanwhile, al-Qassam Brigades’s spokesperson Abu Ubaida announced that three other captives had been killed in the crossfire of the “rescue” operation.