BREAKING NEWS. OCTOBER 17: A real holocaust as the world goes into shock. Nearly 1,000 civilians, mostly women and children are dead in Al-Maamadani hospital, a Gaza hospital blast as Israeli blockade cripples medical response. Palestinian officials say at least 1,000 are likely dead after a deadly blast hit a Gaza hospital on Tuesday, as humanitarian concerns mount over Apartheid Israel’s deprivation of food, fuel and electricity to the enclave’s trapped population.

The Al-Ahli Arab Hospital was founded by the Church of England in 1882 and is currently run by the Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem. It is also known as the Baptist Hospital because it was managed by the US-based Southern Baptist Church between 1954 and 1982. 

Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital was sheltering thousands of displaced people when it was bombed Tuesday, the Palestinian Health Ministry said in a statement. Many victims are still under the rubble, it added. Palestinian officials blamed ongoing Israeli airstrikes for the lethal incident. Trying to distance itself from the calamity which is embarrassing the West’s supporters of Israel the Israel Defense Forces denied any involvement in the hospital attack. No doubt, Western mainstream media will blame Israel’s accusers.

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Gaza has been under siege by Israel for more than a week, in response to the deadly incursion by Hamas, the Islamist militant group that controls the coastal enclave, home to 2.6 million people. Hospitals meanwhile are struggling to tend to the wounded across the territory, operating with shortages of electricity and water.

Amid growing international pressure to address the crisis, US President Joe Biden will travel to Israel on Wednesday, an extraordinary wartime visit that follows intense efforts by Secretary of State Antony Blinken across the Middle East. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas canceled a planned meeting with US President Joe Biden after the hospital attack, saying he would instead travel back to Ramallah for an urgent meeting of the Palestinian leadership.

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Vital humanitarian aid is meanwhile piling up at Gaza’s shuttered border, despite diplomatic efforts to open a corridor from Egypt. The United Nations and other officials have said they need assurance of safe passage for any potential aid convoys. Israeli and US officials on Tuesday said humanitarian aid would be allowed into southern Gaza, but Israel’s national security adviser warned it would be stopped if Hamas intervened. ‘Intense discussions’ are still underway regarding the movement of aid, UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said on Tuesday.

The Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in the center of Gaza City was sheltering thousands of displaced people who were forcibly evacuated from their homes by the occupation, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza. The bombing was described by the Palestinian Foreign Ministry as a ‘cold-blooded massacre.’

The hospital attack will ‘forever remain a stain on the conscience of humanity that has been witnessing the horrors committed against the Palestinian people without taking action to stop it,’ the statement read. Tal Heinrich, a spokesperson for the Israeli prime minister, told CNN Tuesday that ‘IDF does not target hospitals, we only target Hamas’s strongholds, arms depots and terror targets. It comes as Palestinian health officials warn that displaced people continue to be struck by Israeli shelling.

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Over a week of Israeli bombardment has killed at least 3,000 people, including 1,032 girls and 940 boys, and wounded 12,500 in Gaza, the Palestinian Ministry of Health said Tuesday. Casualties in Gaza over the past 10 days have now surpassed the number of those killed during the 51-day Gaza-Israel conflict in 2014.

On Tuesday, Israeli strikes on two densely populated refugee camps and an UNRWA school housing displaced people in central Gaza killed at least 18 people and injured scores, Palestinian officials said. The IDF confirmed that high-level Hamas’s commander Ayman Nofal was killed in the airstrikes in Gaza on Tuesday.

In the occupied West Bank at least 61 people have been killed, the Palestinian Ministry of Health said on Tuesday. At least 20 humanitarian workers from the UN, the Red Cross and the Red Crescent have been killed in Gaza, the UN said.

Meanwhile, health services within Gaza are on the brink and food and water supplies are running low. Twenty out of 23 hospitals were offering partial services because fuel reserves are ‘almost totally depleted,’ the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) warned on Tuesday. UN agencies have warned that shops are less than a week away from running out of available food stocks and that that Gaza’s last seawater desalination plant had shut down, bringing the risk of further deaths, dehydration and waterborne diseases.

Hospitals have been receiving dozens of bodies from different areas of south Gaza, the director of Gaza hospitals, Dr. Mohammad Zaqout, told CNN. The toll includes dozens of victims from air strikes in Rafah. The Palestinian Interior Ministry said Israeli airstrikes had killed at least 49 people in strikes on the southern Gaza cities of Rafah and Khan Younis. Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council Dmitry Medvedev called the attack on a hospital in the Gaza Strip a war crime for which the United States bears responsibility.

He wrote about this in his Telegram channel. ‘The horrific attack on a hospital in the Gaza Strip is clearly a war crime,’ it said. According to Medvedev, the final responsibility for the strike lies with those who ‘cynically make money’ from wars in different countries and on different continents. ‘The United States of America,’ added the Deputy Chairman of the Security Council. Earlier, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh held the United States responsible for Israel’s crimes in Gaza.