What happens when Israel attacks a hospital
The Indonesian hospital on 1 November 2024
Tareq S. Hajjaj reports in Mondoweiss on 21 May 2025:
When the doctors and patients inside the Indonesian Hospital in north Gaza heard the sound of Israeli tanks approaching and the buzzing of quadcopter drones in the sky, a sinking and all-too-familiar feeling set in. After 19 months of Israeli attacks on hospitals across the Strip, their turn had come.
It began at around 2:30 a.m. local time on Sunday, May 18, after a violent night of air raids targeting northern Gaza and the areas around the hospital, forcing residents to flee for their lives. Then the artillery shelling and drone fire began.
“We saw [the Israeli army] and witnessed heavy gunfire and tank shells exploding around us and near us,” Bashar Ahmad, a patient at the hospital, told Mondoweiss. “No one dared look outside the windows of the departments or leave the doors, because anyone who was spotted was shot at. The quadcopters swarmed around the hospital like flies, and we had no idea what they were up to.”
Under heavy fire from the military, some patients, their families, and the displaced people who were sheltering in the hospital were forced to leave. Familiar scenes of desperate people dragging their sick relatives, still in hospital beds, across the rubble-strewn streets of Gaza played out once again. Those whose health conditions prevented them from moving remained in the hospital, only to be surprised by the arrival of tanks and bulldozers.
The bulldozers and tanks carried out extensive destruction on the hospital grounds, including its walls and surrounding areas. Patients, doctors, and displaced families inside the hospital were afraid of being killed or arrested while lying in their hospital beds, according to eyewitness testimony gathered for Mondoweiss.
“They bombed two electricity generators in the hospital, and left one still working,” said Yousef Ezz al-Din, a nurse working at the Indonesian Hospital in northern Gaza. “No one can reach the remaining generator to fill it with diesel, which will run out within hours. The army shoots at anyone who steps outside.”
“Everyone in the hospital is a patient who was already suffering before the siege, due to the lack of medicine and supplies,” Ezz al-Din continued.
Hours after the bulldozers and tanks had arrived, Israeli infantry forces joined them and surrounded the hospital, blocking off any exit. The director of the Indonesian Hospital, Marwan Sultan, told Al Jazeera that the Israeli army had surrounded the hospital and was shooting at anyone who moved. “Israeli aircraft targeted the intensive care unit inside the hospital,” he added