Palestinian nurse Abdelsalam Barakat recounts the moments as ambulances were hit by Israeli air strikes in Gaza.
Palestinian nurse Abdelsalam Barakat was inside an ambulance trying to transport patients with skull and chest fractures out of north Gaza when explosions struck at various times.
“The ambulance was shaking so much,” he said of the terrifying Israeli air strikes on Friday that hit around him and his charges from Al Shifa Hospital. “It placed them between life and death but we couldn’t do anything about it.”
One of Israel’s attacks, among so many on the besieged Gaza for the last month, targeted an ambulance, which Israel claimed that it was carrying fighters of Hamas.
However, the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza, a hospital director, and the Palestinian Red Crescent Society all said the convoy of five ambulances was evacuating wounded to supposedly safer south Gaza prior to possibly crossing the border to Egypt.
Paramedics, patients in peril
The first strike, at a roundabout a few minutes away from the hospital, injured a paramedic and a passenger in one of the ambulances, Barakat said.
The second, near the hospital gate as the convoy was returning there having abandoned the attempt to drive south, hit an ambulance ahead of his, killing a paramedic and others nearby, he added.
With bodies lying in pools of blood, Barakat’s vehicle fled the chaos and headed for the central ambulance station, about 1.2 km away, other strikes shaking them en route.
Eventually, they took the patients back to Al Shifa – no nearer evacuation and in a worse state than before.
‘No safe place anymore’
Hospital director Mohammad Abu Selmeyah said 15 people had been killed and 60 injured in the strike at the hospital gate.
The UN secretary general and aid agencies working in Gaza condemned the attack “This is a new low in an endless stream of unconscionable violence,” said Doctors Without Borders.
Ashraf, a resident of Gaza City sheltering in Al Shifa for three weeks with his wife and four children, said he ran outside when the ambulance convoy was hit.
“At the door of the hospital, I saw the ambulance that was hit and people scattered nearby, wounded, and many were dead. One of my relatives was among the dead too. He was so young,” said Ashraf, who did not want to give his family name for safety reasons.
“There was no time to grieve. I got involved with others in carrying the wounded into the hospital… If they hit ambulances there is no safe place anymore.”
