A BBC journalist broke down in tears in a Gaza hospital after meeting a girl whose home was destroyed and family killed, saying she is the same age as his daughter. BBC Arabic reporter Adnan El-Bursh fell to his knees and removed his glasses before wiping his face as he was overcome by emotion at the Al Shifa Hospital yesterday. Mr El-Bursh and his team – including cameraman Mahmoud al-Ajrami, who was also left in tears – had discovered that their friends, relatives and neighbors were among those injured or killed in the hospital and he described how ‘bodies lay everywhere’.
In Mr El-Bursh’s report, a young girl with a bloodied face was seen sitting upright in a hospital bed while crying and covered in dust as a doctor tended to her legs. The journalist and producer, who lives in Gaza and has worked for the BBC since December 2010, revealed the child had lost her home and her relatives were dead. He said: ‘This young girl’s home was destroyed. Her relatives have been killed and she needs help. My daughter is the same age. I want to give her a hug.’
Mr El-Bursh wrote in an accompanying BBC News report that the girl was ‘brought in screaming from intense pain and shock’ and had been calling out to doctors to ‘treat her and to get rid of her pain’ after her home was ‘shelled by Israeli forces’. Hundreds of seriously injured people were filling the hallways of Gaza’s largest medical facility amid traumatic scenes, with bodies lying in corridors and outside. Speaking to the camera, Mr El-Bursh, who is a father, said: ‘This is my local hospital, inside are my friends, my neighbors. This is my community. Today has been one of the most difficult days in my career. I have seen things that I can never unseen.’
Mr El-Bursh also said that amid what he labelled as ‘chaos’, his cameraman Mr al-Ajrami saw his friend Malik in the hospital having survived – but his family were dead. It comes as the United Nations said today that Israel’s military had told some one million Palestinians living in Gaza to evacuate the north . In other developments: During his report, Mr El-Burhs also spoke to a mother who was sitting next to the bodies of her dead relatives. She told him: ‘We were sleeping and they were bombarding the house like everyone else. We don’t have any resistance fighters in our building. All the building is full of residents. 120 people live there.’
Mr El-Bursh also said: ‘The corridors of Al Shifa Hospital are filled with bodies. The morgue can no longer cope. ‘The bodies of the dead have to be laid on the floor outside the hospital entrance. ‘You never want to become the story, yet in my city I feel helpless as the dead were given no dignity and the injured all left in pain.’ His report was released hours before the UN revealed that one million Palestinians living in Gaza had been told by Israel to evacuate the north. It is an unprecedented order for almost half the population of the sealed-off territory ahead of an expected ground invasion against the ruling Hamas militant group.
The UN has warned that so many people fleeing en masse would be calamitous. Hamas, which staged a brutal attack on Israel this week, dismissed the order as a ploy and called on people to stay in their homes, adding to the widespread panic. The evacuation order, which includes Gaza City, home to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, sparked confusion among civilians and aid workers already running from Israeli air strikes and contending with a total siege and a territory-wide power blackout. Palestinians would only be able to flee south within Gaza as Israel has completely sealed off the territory, a narrow strip of land about 25 miles long. Hamas said Israel’s heavy bombardment of the Gaza Strip killed 13 hostages, including foreigners, held by the group.
The group’s military wing said the 13 were killed in various locations over the past 24 hours. It did not give the nationality of the foreigners, and there has been no confirmation over the claims from Israel. The Israeli military had said it would operate with ‘significant force’ in Gaza in the coming days and is calling on civilians to evacuate. Spokesman Jonathan Conricus said Israeli forces ‘will make extensive efforts to avoid harming civilians’. He added: ‘Out of an understanding that there are civilians here who are not our enemy and we do not want to target them, we are asking them to evacuate.’ The directive came on the heels of what the United Nations said was a warning they received from Israel to evacuate 1.1 million people living in northern Gaza within 24 hours.
Suffering in Gaza has risen dramatically with Palestinians desperate for food, fuel and medicine, while the territory’s only power plant shut down for lack of fuel. The mortuary at Gaza’s biggest hospital Al Shifa overflowed as bodies came in faster than relatives could claim them. US defense secretary Lloyd Austin is set to visit today, a day after American secretary of state Antony Blinken was in Israel for talks with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The war has claimed at least 2,800 lives on both sides since Hamas launched an incursion on October 7.
Inas Hamdan, an officer at the UN Palestinian refugee agency in Gaza City, said: ‘This is chaos, no-one understands what to do.’ She said all the UN staff in Gaza City and northern Gaza had been told to evacuate south to Rafah. Nebal Farsakh, a spokeswoman for the Palestinian Red Crescent in Gaza City, claimed there was no way more than one million people could be safely moved within the timeframe specified, saying: ‘Forget about food, forget about electricity, forget about fuel. The only concern now is just if … you’re going to live.’ She added: ‘What will happen to our patients? We have wounded, we have elderly, we have children who are in hospitals.’ The flurry of directives was taken as signaling an expected Israeli ground offensive, though the Israeli military has not yet confirmed such a decision.
Yesterday it said that while it was preparing, no decision has been made. The UN said the broad evacuation warning it received for all of Gaza’s north also applies to all UN staff and to the hundreds of thousands who have taken shelter in UN schools and other facilities since Israel launched round-the-clock air strikes on Saturday. ‘The United Nations considers it impossible for such a movement to take place without devastating humanitarian consequences,’ UN spokeswoman Stephane Dujarric said. ‘The United Nations strongly appeals for any such order, if confirmed, to be rescinded avoiding what could transform what is already a tragedy into a calamitous situation.’ Another UN official said that the UN is seeking clarity from Israeli officials at the most senior political level.
A ground offensive in Gaza, which is ruled by Hamas, would likely bring even higher casualties on both sides in brutal house-to-house fighting. Hamas’ unprecedented assault last Saturday and smaller attacks since have killed more than 1,300 people in Israel, including 247 soldiers – a toll unseen in Israel for decades – and the ensuing Israeli bombardment has killed more than 1,530 people in Gaza, according to authorities on both sides. Israel says roughly 1,500 Hamas militants were killed inside Israel, and that hundreds of the dead in Gaza are Hamas members. Thousands have been wounded on both sides. As Israel pounds Gaza from the air, Hamas militants have fired thousands of rockets into Israel. Amid concerns that the fighting could spread in the region, Syrian state media reported that Israeli air strikes yesterday put two Syrian international airports out of service.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to ‘crush’ Hamas after the militants stormed into the country’s south last Saturday and massacred hundreds of people, including children in their own homes and young people at a music festival. Amid grief and demands for vengeance among the Israeli public, the government is under intense pressure to topple Hamas rather than continuing to try to bottle it up in Gaza. The number of people forced from their homes by Israel’s air strikes soared by 25 per cent in a day, reaching 423,000 out of a population of 2.3 million, the UN said yesterday. Also yesterday, the Israeli military pulverized the Gaza Strip with air strikes, prepared for a possible ground invasion and said its complete siege of the territory would remain in place until Hamas militants free some 150 hostages taken during their weekend incursion. Read the full story: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12626679/Moment-BBC-reporter-breaks-tears-reporting-inside-Gaza-hospital-sees-things-never-unseen-amid-Israeli-bombardment.html?ito=msngallery
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