‘Without electricity, hospitals will turn into morgues’: Stark warning as power runs out in Gaza after Israel said humanitarian aid would be blocked until Hamas released hostages

The Red Cross today warned hospitals in Gaza will ‘turn into morgues’ as the power begins to run out in the enclave where millions of Palestinians are stranded amid Israel’s total siege of the small strip of land.

With the power cut and fuel for generators blocked by Israeli forces, aid workers warned that hospitals in Gaza are ‘on the verge of collapse’ due to the lack of energy that is set to run out completely in the next few hours.

‘As Gaza loses power, hospitals lose power, putting newborns in incubators and elderly patients on oxygen at risk. Kidney dialysis stops, and X-rays can’t be taken,’ Fabrizio Carboni of the International Committee of the Red Cross said. 

‘Without electricity, hospitals risk turning into morgues,’ Carboni said before adding: ‘The human misery caused by this escalation is abhorrent, and I implore the sides to reduce the suffering of civilians.’

His stark prediction comes as Israel today warned it wouldn’t let any food, medicine or electricity reach the 2.3million residents trapped in the Gaza Strip until Hamas terrorists release the scores of Israeli hostages they captured.

‘Humanitarian aid to Gaza? No electrical switch will be turned on, no water hydrant will be opened and no fuel truck will enter until the Israeli abductees are returned home,’ Israel’s Energy Minister Israel Katz vowed in a sinister threat. 

‘Humanitarian for humanitarian. And no one will preach us morals,’ Katz added. 

Israeli airstrikes continued to obliterate entire neighbourhoods today, while the IDF encircled Gaza with 300,000 troops ahead of an expected ground offensive that will see fighting in the streets. 

Whilst Israel’s political leaders have not yet decided on whether to launch the ground assault on the terrorists, the army said they are preparing for such an offensive that will be aimed at ‘taking out ‘ the group’s senior leadership including top government officials. 

‘We are waiting to see what our political leadership decides about a potential ground’ incursion, army spokesman Richard Hecht said. 

‘This has not been decided yet… But we are preparing for a ground manoeuvre if it is decided,’ Hecht continued, while adding the possible operation ‘could be from the air, it could be combined from the sea (and) air’.

Meanwhile, the airstrikes, which have killed 1,354 civilians in Gaza, and the total siege of the enclave has prompted the US to warn Israel to ‘uphold the laws of war’. 

US President Joe Biden said Israel had a right to respond to the attacks by Hamas terrorists, which has seen 1,300 Israelis massacred – shot dead in their homes as they begged for their lives or while they fled a music festival. But he warned that its retaliatory action must be ‘according to the rule of law’.

Yet Katz’s comments this morning shows that there is no sign the total siege of Gaza, which has seen Israel cut off water, food and electricity to force its residents into starvation as they are pounded by constant airstrikes, will end any time soon given that Hamas has said it wouldn’t release its 97 hostages until the bombardment ends.

Indeed, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last night vowed to ‘crush and destroy’ Hamas with the support of a new war cabinet that includes a longtime opposition critic as the airstrikes continued to pummel targets across the Gaza strip overnight and into this morning.  

‘Every Hamas member is a dead man,’ the Israeli Prime Minister said menacingly in a televised address late last night, perhaps revealing the scale of the ground assault operation for which his Defence Forces are preparing as they encircle Gaza.

An army spokesman said today that Israel’s military assault against Hamas is focusing on ‘taking out’ the Islamist group’s senior leadership in the Gaza Strip, including chief Yahya Sinwar. 

‘Right now we are focused on taking out their senior leadership, not only the military leadership (but) also their governmental leadership, all the way up to Sinwar,’ Richard Hecht told journalists, referring to Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s chief in Gaza.

He said the army is preparing for a ground assault on Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip but that the country’s political leaders had not yet taken a decision. The army has deployed tens of thousands of troops to the border with the Gaza Strip as it continues a withering air campaign it says targets Hamas infrastructure, commanders and operating centres in the enclave.

‘We are preparing ourselves for the next stages of war… to prepare for multiple operative contingency plans,’ Hecht said. He said the possible operation ‘could be from the air, it could be combined from the sea (and) air’.

In a separate briefing to reporters, chief military spokesman Daniel Hagari reiterated the army’s plans against the terrorists. ‘We are crushing Hamas’ ability to function as sovereign,’ Hagari said.

‘It is already failing to run Gaza in some areas,’ he continued, adding that they would continue to target the group until it is no longer able to rule ‘in all of Gaza’.

Meanwhile, the Israeli military said overnight strikes targeted Hamas’ elite Nukhba forces, including command centres used by the fighters who attacked Israel on Saturday, and the home of a senior Hamas naval operative that it said was used to store unspecified weapons.

The Hamas-run Interior Ministry in Gaza said Israeli strikes demolished two multi-story houses on top of residents without warning, killing and wounding ‘a large number’ of people, mainly civilians. Hamas has threatened to kill Israeli hostages if Israel strikes Palestinian civilians without warning.

Israel said today it has been able to identify 97 Israelis hostages, many of whom are women and children who were dragged from their homes on Saturday. Israel had earlier said up to 150 civilians had been abducted.

Meanwhile, ordinary Palestinians in Gaza spent the night in pitch darkness, surrounded by the ruins of pulverised neighbourhoods as international aid groups warned that deaths could accelerate as the territory runs out of supplies amid an Israeli blockade. 

Israel has halted the entry of food, water, fuel and medicine into the territory. On Tuesday, Gaza’s only power station ran out of fuel and shut down, leaving only lights powered by scattered private generators. Those will shut off as well if fuel is not allowed in.

The war, which was ignited by a bloody and wide-ranging Hamas attack into Israel, has already claimed at least 2,600 lives on both sides.

A senior Israeli Air Force officer, Brig. Gen. Omer Tishler, said on Wednesday the strikes were on an ‘unprecedented scale’.

He said Israel has focused its efforts on targeting Hamas officials, and stopping them from ever attacking Israel again.

Hamas violence has killed 1,200 Israelis – many of them at a music festival, or living in small farming and artistic communities near the Gaza Strip. The terrorists in Gaza are holding an estimated 150 people taken hostage from Israel – soldiers, men, women, children and older adults – and have fired thousands of rockets into Israel over the past five days.

Hamas terrorists massacred families including children at a series of Israeli settlements on the first day of their incursion. The gunmen arrived first at the Kfar Aza kibbutz, where they shot dead screaming families as they begged for their lives before setting fire to their homes. 

Tishler, the Israel Air Force’s chief of staff, said: ‘There is an enemy here firing rockets, raiding a civilian population. We will never allow that again.’

Terror groups have fired more than 5,000 rockets at Israel since Saturday, the IDF said.

Tishler said the IAF was not targeting civilians in the Gaza Strip, but that the strikes were no longer ‘surgical.’

‘We do not act like the other side, we do not attack the civilian population. Behind every attack there is a target,’ he said.

‘We act precisely and professionally but not surgically. I’m not talking about single, tens, or hundreds [of strikes]. We are talking about thousands of munitions.’

The IDF has carried out strikes against at least 2,687 targets across the Gaza Strip since Saturday, according to military data from Wednesday morning obtained by The Times of Israel.

The Israeli government is under intense public pressure to topple Hamas after its terrorists stormed through a border fence Saturday and massacred hundreds of Israelis in their homes, on the streets and at an outdoor music festival.

Netanyahu alleged that the attackers engaged in atrocities, including binding boys and girls and shooting them in the head, burning people alive, raping women and beheading soldiers.

The prime minister’s allegations could not be independently confirmed, and authorities did not immediately offer further details. Rescue workers and witnesses have described horrifying scenes, including the slaughter of elderly people and finding bloody rooms crowded with massacred civilians.

Opposition leader Benny Gantz, a former defence minister and political opponent of Netanyahu, yesterday joined a new wartime cabinet at a time when the Israeli military appears increasingly likely to launch a ground offensive into Gaza. 

‘Our partnership is not political, it is a shared fate,’ said Gantz. ‘At this time we are all the soldiers of Israel.’

Netanyahu said the people of Israel and its leadership were united. ‘We have put aside all differences because the fate of our state is on the line,’ he said.

Israel has mobilised 360,000 reservists, massed additional forces near Gaza and evacuated tens of thousands of residents from nearby communities.

The forces are preparing for an imminent ground operation as increasingly destructive airstrikes in Gaza have flattened entire city blocks and left unknown numbers of bodies beneath debris. 

A ground offensive in Gaza, whose 2.3 million residents are densely packed into a strip of land only 25 miles long, would likely result in a surge of casualties on both sides.

The UN said late Wednesday the number of people displaced by the airstrikes had soared 30 percent within 24 hours, to 339,000, two-thirds of them crowding into UN schools. Others sought shelter in the shrinking number of safe neighbourhoods.

The Egyptian government rejected an American proposal to allow Palestinians fleeing Israel’s bombardment to leave Gaza, a senior Egyptian official said early Thursday, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to talk to the press. 

Egypt believes that Palestinians leaving Gaza would harm the Palestinian cause, and its state-run media reported that the Israeli offensive is part of a scheme to empty the enclave.

Convoys stood loaded with fuel and food Wednesday on the Egyptian side of the Rafah crossing, but were unable to enter Gaza, the official said. The only crossing point between Egypt and Gaza was shut down Tuesday following nearby Israeli airstrikes.

The official said Egypt was talking with Israel and the US on establishing safe corridors inside Gaza and delivering humanitarian aid to the besieged Palestinians, and with Israel and other foreign governments to evacuate foreigners through the Rafah crossing point.

Meanwhile, US president Joe Biden dispatched his top diplomat to the Middle East to show Washington’s enduring support for Israel, seek to secure the release of captives, including Americans, and prevent a wider war from erupting.

Blinken will arrive on Thursday and will also visit Jordan, but will not visit the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where he ordinarily meets Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

Blinken and Abbas will meet on Friday, Hussein Al-Sheikh, secretary general of the executive committee of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, said on social media platform X, without elaborating.

Speaking to a roundtable of Jewish community leaders in Washington, Biden said his deployment of military ships and aircraft closer to Israel should be seen as a signal to Iran, which backs Islamist groups Hamas and Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

‘We made it clear to the Iranians: Be careful,’ Biden said.

Iran likely knew Hamas terrorists were planning ‘operations against Israel’ but initial U.S. intelligence reports showed that some Iranian leaders were surprised by the group’s unprecedented attack from Gaza, U.S. sources said on Wednesday.

Iran has said it was not involved in the Hamas attacks.

Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman discussed the conflict on Wednesday, in the first telephone call between the two leaders since a China-brokered deal between Tehran and Riyadh to resume ties.

Raisi and the Saudi crown prince discussed the ‘need to end war crimes against Palestine,’ Iranian state media said.

The Saudi crown prince ‘affirmed that the Kingdom is making all possible efforts in communicating with all international and regional parties to stop the ongoing escalation,’ Saudi state news agency SPA said.