# Israeli strike on Gaza hospital tent camp kills at least four and ignites fire

On Oct. 14, 2024, an Israeli air attack on the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital complex in Deir el-Balah killed at least four people and wounded dozens more, according to the supplied Al Jazeera report. The strike set fire to a packed tent camp where displaced Palestinians had been sheltering, turning a hospital courtyard into a scene of smoke, burned fabric and desperate rescue efforts.

Video and witness accounts in the report described rescuers scrambling to pull people from the flames as the fire spread through the tents. Om Ahmad Radi, a survivor, said people woke to smoke, falling fire and burning debris from every direction. Volunteer surgeon Mohammad Tahir told Al Jazeera that many of the victims suffered burns on 60 to 80 percent of their bodies and that some would not survive. Hospital records cited by The Associated Press put the toll at four dead and 40 wounded, while 25 people were transferred to Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza with severe burns.

Israel said the air force had targeted a Hamas command-and-control centre, but it did not provide evidence in the supplied excerpt. Gaza's Media Office said it was the seventh time that year Israel had hit the grounds of Al-Aqsa Hospital and the third time in a matter of weeks. Al Jazeera's Hani Mahmoud said more than 20 tents were destroyed and that many people inside them could not be saved because the flames spread too quickly through the tightly packed shelter area.

The attack came against a wider backdrop of collapse in Gaza's health system. The same report cited a recent United Nations inquiry that said Israel had pursued a concerted policy to destroy the territory's healthcare system. It also said Gaza's health ministry warned that generators in all health facilities could stop within 10 days because of shortages of fuel, filters and spare parts, a warning that would put intensive care, operating rooms and nurseries at risk. At the same time, civilians were still dealing with repeated displacement and winter conditions in tents already damaged by rain and wind.

The source placed the hospital strike alongside other assaults, including a shelling attack on a school in Nuseirat that killed 22 people the previous night. Taken together, the reporting showed how shelters, hospitals and schools had become recurring targets in a war that had already uprooted most of Gaza's population. The Al-Aqsa attack stood out because it combined mass displacement, a hospital setting and a fire that left rescuers trying to save people trapped in a crowded compound.

The hospital strike showed how thin Gaza's remaining safety net had become. A camp of tents set up inside a medical compound should have offered at least temporary shelter, but instead it became another place where fire, smoke and burn injuries overwhelmed medics who were already working with scarce supplies. The warning about generators running out of fuel made the situation even more precarious, because the next emergency would not only be about treating wounds from the strike but about keeping the hospital itself functioning at all.