An Israeli air attack on a tent camp inside the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital complex in Deir el-Balah killed at least four people and wounded dozens more on December 4, turning a place meant for refuge into a scene of fire, smoke and mass burns.
The supplied report said flames swept through a packed displacement camp after the strike. Hospital records cited by the Associated Press put the toll at four dead and 40 wounded, while Al Jazeera's reporting from the scene said more than 20 tents were destroyed and many people inside could not be saved.
Witnesses described a fast-moving fire that spread through tightly packed shelters. One survivor said people woke to smoke, flames and burning debris falling on the tents from every direction. A volunteer surgeon told Al Jazeera that burn victims arrived with injuries covering 60 to 80 percent of their bodies and that many were unlikely to survive.
The Israeli military said it had targeted a Hamas command-and-control centre, but the supplied excerpt says no evidence was provided. Gaza's media office said the strike was the seventh time that year Israel had hit the grounds of Al-Aqsa Hospital and the third in the previous couple of weeks. The attack also followed an earlier strike on a school sheltering displaced people in Nuseirat that reportedly killed 22 people and wounded 80 others.
The broader setting was a war that had already displaced most of Gaza's population. The supplied report said around 90 percent of the enclave's 2.3 million people had been uprooted, many repeatedly, and that an estimated 400,000 Palestinians remained in the north amid Israeli evacuation orders. It also noted that the UN had said no food had entered northern Gaza since October 1.
The attack on the hospital camp fitted a pattern described in the same report: repeated strikes on shelters, medical facilities and crowded civilian spaces, with the Israeli military arguing that armed groups were using them. The event date report does not resolve that dispute, but it does show the immediate human cost of the strike. Rescue teams were still trying to find people trapped in the blaze as the hospital treated severe burns and transferred patients south.
For the displaced families in Deir el-Balah, the camp had been a last line of safety. On December 4, it became another site of loss, adding to a war in which temporary shelter offered little protection from the next attack.
