GAZA – Intense fighting raged around Gaza hospitals on Sunday, with some of them running out of fuel and power, prompting a top United Nations official to condemn Israel’s attacks on hospitals as “unconscionable” and “reprehensible”.

The Palestine Red Crescent Society said the Al-Quds Hospital in the Gaza Strip was “out of service and no longer operational” due to “depletion of available fuel and power outage”.

Al-Shifa, the largest medical facility that houses thousands of refugees, as well as other hospitals in northern Gaza, were also barely able to care for patients.

Dr Mohammad Qandil of Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip said: “Shifa Hospital now isn’t working, no one is allowed in, nobody is allowed out. And if you are wounded or injured around Gaza area, you can’t be evacuated by our ambulance to Shifa Hospital, so Shifa Hospital now is out of service.”

Mr Martin Griffiths, the UN humanitarian aid chief, said hospitals across Gaza had been left with “no power, food or water”, and there had been shooting at civilians as they tried to flee.

“This is unconscionable, reprehensible and must stop,” he said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter. “There can be no justification for acts of war in healthcare facilities.”

But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday that Israel had offered fuel to Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital.

“On the contrary, we offered actually, last night, to give them enough fuel to operate the hospital, operate the incubators and so on, because we (have) no battle with patients or civilians at all,” he told NBC News.

“Hamas, (which) is hiding in the hospitals and placing itself there, doesn’t want the fuel for the hospital... it wants to get fuel that it will take from the hospitals to the tunnels, to its war machine.”

Hamas denies Israeli allegations that it has command posts under Al-Shifa and other Gaza hospitals.

Israel’s military also said it was ready to evacuate babies from Al-Shifa on Sunday, but Palestinian officials said the people inside were still trapped, with three newborns dead and dozens at risk from a power outage.

Speaking from inside the biggest hospital, Al-Shifa, Gaza Health Ministry spokesman Ashraf Al-Qidra said Israeli fire had not hit it directly overnight but was “terrorising medical officials and civilians alike”.

When asked about Israel’s offer to evacuate the babies, Mr Al-Qidra said: “We have not been informed about any mechanism to get the babies out to a safer hospital. So far, we are praying for their safety and not to lose more of them.”

Twenty of Gaza’s 36 hospitals are “no longer functioning”, according to UN’s humanitarian agency.

In the Indonesian Hospital in Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip, Mosab Subeih, a baby boy, had been rushed in from a house that was struck by an Israeli missile.

“He has a direct injury to the head and is bleeding, and we have no surgery,” said one of the medics treating him with a manual resuscitator as power had been cut.

On Sunday, Israel said people could safely evacuate from three hospitals in northern Gaza, including Al-Shifa, via one of its exits. Hospital director Mohammad Abu Selmeyah told Al Arabiya television that there was no safe passage out.

With the humanitarian situation across Gaza worsening, 80 foreigners and several injured Palestinians crossed into Egypt in the first evacuations since Friday, four Egyptian security sources said. Poland said 18 of them were Polish citizens.

Very little aid has entered Gaza since Israel declared war on Hamas more than a month ago after militants rampaged through southern Israel, killing about 1,200 people and taking more than 200 hostage, according to Israeli officials.

Palestinian officials said on Friday that 11,078 Gaza residents had been killed in air and artillery strikes since then, around 40 per cent of them children.

Disease is spreading amid evacuees packed into schools and other shelters and surviving on tiny amounts of food and water, international aid agencies say.

Some countries have taken to delivering aid by parachute. Jordan said it had airdropped a batch into a field hospital early on Sunday.

On Saturday, the leaders of Iran and Saudi Arabia, two regional rivals that restored diplomatic ties in 2023, met in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, at a summit, where they called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.

The two Islamic countries, which support opposing factions in proxy conflicts across the region, announced their diplomatic breakthrough in March, after years of hostility, in a deal brokered by China. But it was unclear whether the shift would lead to a lasting detente between Saudi Arabia’s Sunni monarchy and Iran’s Shi’ite government.

Israel’s bombardment of the Gaza Strip, however, appears to have hastened the warming of ties between Saudi Arabia and Iran, just as delicate diplomacy had been inching Saudi Arabia and Israel towards possible normalisation of relations. Iran, which Israel considers its most dangerous foe, is a powerful patron of Hamas.

Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, whose visit to Saudi Arabia was the first by an Iranian president to the kingdom in more than a decade, was greeted at the summit venue by Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The Iranian President draped on his shoulder a keffiyeh, the black-and-white square chequered scarf that has become a badge of Palestinian identity.

The two leaders had spoken by phone for the first time just a few days after Oct 7.

At the summit, Mr Raisi criticised the international community for what he said was its silence on violations committed against Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Israel and the United States – Israel’s most important ally – oppose a ceasefire for now, saying it would only allow Hamas’ military wing to regroup, although Israel has agreed to what officials call short “humanitarian pauses” to allow people to leave combat zones.

The Saudi Crown Prince said the crisis had demonstrated “the failure of the Security Council and the international community to put an end to the flagrant Israeli violations of international laws”.

The Arab and Muslim participants at the summit called for an arms embargo against Israel, and said regional peace could not be achieved without resolving the Palestinian issue based on a two-state solution, a long-time pillar of Middle East diplomacy efforts.

Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Minister, Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al-Saud, said regional countries’ pressure on Israel was beginning to pay off.

“We are starting to see a shift in positions, not enough yet, but moving in the right direction,” he said at a news conference after the summit.

“We are starting to hear that countries that used to give Israel a blank cheque are now talking about protecting civilians and the importance of conducting combat within the boundaries of international humanitarian law and humanitarian pauses.”

French President Emmanuel Macron on Friday called on Israel to stop the killing in Gaza. Mr Macron had expressed firm support for Mr Netanyahu in the immediate aftermath of the Oct 7 attack.

But international support for Israel after the attack has eroded as images emerge daily of the destruction and death in the Gaza Strip from Israel’s military campaign.

After the Saudi and Iranian leaders finished their speeches, they left the main conference hall for a bilateral meeting.

The Crown Prince’s welcoming of Mr Raisi amounted to a remarkable departure for the Saudi leader, who once bluntly warned Iran not to pursue expansionist policies in the region. “We won’t wait for the battle to be in Saudi Arabia,” he said in a televised interview in 2017. “Instead, we will work so that the battle is for them in Iran, not in Saudi Arabia.”

He also once likened Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to Adolf Hitler in interviews with American news outlets. “Because he wants to expand – he wants to create his own project in the Middle East very much like Hitler, who wanted to expand at the time,” the Crown Prince told CBS News in 2018.

Dr Kristin Diwan, a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, said Saudi Arabia’s close consultations with Iran demonstrated a pragmatism by the kingdom.

“They know Iranian cooperation is needed to prevent the conflict from spreading and, perhaps, even in navigating an endgame with Hamas,” Dr Diwan said.

“But with some leaders boxed in by normalisation and others demanding tougher measures, Saudi Arabia is well placed to hold the middle ground,” she said. “To succeed, they will need the Americans to step up.”

Since the war, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and its regional allies have carried out a stream of rocket and drone attacks against US forces in Iraq and Syria. Hezbollah, the powerful Iran-backed militia group in Lebanon, has also continued to exchange fire with Israel’s military, raising fears of a wider conflict. REUTERS, NYTIMES