Hundreds of Palestinians left al-Shifa hospital on Saturday and headed south on foot.
Wounded patients, medical workers and hundreds of displaced Palestinians left the Gaza Strip’s largest hospital complex on Saturday, a witness and a hospital doctor said, days after Israeli troops stormed the complex in search of Hamas command centers.
There was confusion about what had prompted the people to leave the besieged hospital, Al-Shifa, in Gaza City. According to the witness, who was interviewed by telephone, Israeli troops announced an evacuation by megaphone.
The Israeli military said it had not ordered an evacuation but had agreed to a request made by the hospital’s director to allow patients and medical workers who wished to leave the hospital to do so safely.
There were no ambulances, nothing,” said the witness, Mahmoud Abu Harbed, a resident of northern Gaza who spent more than a month at Al-Shifa. The roads from the hospital, he said, were heavily damaged by bombing.
He said most of the departing Palestinians had left the complex on foot.
Adnan al-Bursh, a doctor at Al-Shifa, told Al Jazeera in a televised interview that Israeli troops had ordered those remaining in the hospital to leave. They marched out past tanks, he said, with some fleeing toward southern Gaza and others heading elsewhere in Gaza’s embattled north.
“We walked alongside the wounded and the elderly,” Dr. al-Bursh said. “It was a terrifying sight, God help us.”
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