At least three premature babies have died at the Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza when a missile struck nearby and shut down the medical facility’s backup generator, according to a doctor working at the hospital.
Dr. Ahmed Mokhallalti, the chief plastic surgeon at the hospital, told ABC News that the babies died when the power to their incubators was cut off Friday night into Saturday morning.
Mokhallalti said all of the hospital’s ventilators were back up and running Sunday, but he expressed fear that more people would die at the hospital due to the relentless bombing.
Hospital officials said two patients in the hospital’s intensive care unit also died on Sunday due to complications caused by the shelling.
The international humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders has made repeated calls for the shelling of hospitals in Gaza to cease.
“We are nearly sure that we are alone now. No one hears us,” Dr. Mohammed Obeid of Doctors Without Borders said in a video statement from the Al-Shifa Hospital on Saturday.
Obeid said there are about 600 patients at the hospital who need medical care and need to be evacuated.
“The problem is [we need] to be sure we can evacuate the neonatal patients because we have 37 to 40 premature babies,” Obeid said. “We have about 17 other patients in the ICU, and we have 600 postoperative patients who need medical care. So the situation is very bad. We need help.”
–ABC News’ Zoe Magee, Matt Gutman and Sami Zayara