The Hamas Health Ministry announced on Friday that at least five patients have died due to a power outage, which meant that oxygen did not reach their rooms, in a hospital in the Gaza Strip that was taken over by the Israeli army.

“The hospital complex’s generators stopped working and electricity was cut off” at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, the ministry said in a statement, holding Israeli forces “responsible” for the deaths of five patients.

The same source explained that Israeli operations around the hospital and inside it interrupted deliveries of fuel necessary to operate the generators.

The ministry added that it was concerned about the fate of seven more patients — four in intensive care units and three in the infant ward — and held “Israeli forces responsible for the health of patients and staff” at the hospital.

He had announced the day before Thursday that hundreds of people, patients, medical and nursing staff and civilians, were still inside the building complex.

Israeli forces “are still holding many medical and nursing staff, patients and displaced people in the maternity clinic building and are interrogating them,” he added last night.

The Israeli army, for its part, assured that the “targeted operation” at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis was carried out because it had “reliable information” from the special services, according to which Hamas had held hostages there and possibly “bodies of hostages” were still there. ».

Last Friday night, the Israeli army reported that its members found drugs with the names of hostages written on them.

He also confirmed that he repaired the hospital’s generator, denying that he targeted the infrastructure that supplies the health structure with electricity.

After more than four months of war, hostilities are centered in the southern part of the besieged and largely flattened Gaza Strip, between the towns of Khan Younis and Rafah — the latter on the southern edge of the enclave, on the closed border with Egypt.

Nasser Hospital had become a shelter for thousands of those displaced by the hostilities, some of whom have fled in recent days amid chaotic conditions as fighting between the Israeli army and Hamas raged ever closer to the health facility.

The war was sparked by an unprecedented attack by Hamas’ military arm in southern Israel on October 7 that killed more than 1,160 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli data.

Israeli military retaliatory operations in the Gaza Strip have claimed the lives of at least 28,775 people, the vast majority of them civilians, according to the latest casualty count released by the Hamas Health Ministry on Friday.