Israel offers incubators for Gaza babies after Biden says hospitals "must be protected"

President Biden said Monday that hospitals in the Gaza Strip "must be protected" after the World Health Organization called the situation for patients at the Palestinian territory's largest hospital, Al Shifa, "dire and perilous."

"My hope and expectation is that there will be less intrusive action relative to hospitals," Mr. Biden said in response to questions from journalists.

Al Shifa is in the heart of Gaza City and at the center of a tense standoff. Israel accuses Hamas of having an underground headquarters under the sprawling facility, which Hamas and doctors at Al Shifa deny. Both Israeli and U.S. officials have stressed that Hamas has a long history of positioning weapons and fighters in civilian homes, schools and hospitals.

But the situation for patients at Al Shifa continues to deteriorate, with one surgeon working there from the charity Doctors Without Borders, which goes by its French acronym MSF, calling conditions at the medical center "inhuman."

"We don't have electricity. There's no water in the hospital," the surgeon said Monday, according to MSF. "There's no food. People will die in a few hours without functioning ventilators."

The surgeon said staff and patients at the hospital need safe passage to evacuate.

"The medical team agreed to leave the hospital only if patients are evacuated first: we don't want to leave our patients. There are 600 inpatients, 37 babies, someone who needs an ICU, we can't leave them," the surgeon said Monday.

The fate of dozens of babies left without incubators after the power went out at the hospital over the weekend remained in the balance. Images provided by doctors at Al Shifa to the medical nonprofit Medical Aid for Palestinians showed the infants laid out together on beds covered with aluminum foil and blankets in an attempt to keep them warm.

"It's becoming winter and the weather is becoming colder now. For that reason, without having proper temperature for them, they immediately die," Mehdat Abbas, director general of the Hamas-run Ministry of Health, told CBS News on Monday. "I hope — I hope — that they will remain alive despite the disaster this hospital is passing through."

Israel's military said it was attempting to coordinate the transfer of special incubators to Al Shifa. The incubators would not need to be connected to a power source, IDF Lt. Col. Amnon Shefler told CBS News. Shefler said these incubators could be used to transfer the infants to another facility.

The IDF said Sunday that it had left about 80 gallons of fuel outside Al Shifa to help power its generator, which it said Hamas had prevented hospital staff from collecting. The medical director of the hospital said that amount of fuel would only have been enough to power the generator for 15 to 30 minutes.

Outside Al Shifa, more and more dead bodies were being crudely stored together, many on the ground. Morgues were full or without power, so corpses have been left to decompose. 

The United Nations' Humanitarian Affairs Office (OCHA) said Tuesday that all but one of the hospitals in the northern part of Gaza were reportedly out of service, "due to the lack of power, medical consumables, oxygen, food and water, compounded by bombardments and fighting in their vicinities."

It said the only facility still capable of taking in patients was the Al Ahli Hospital in Gaza City, which it said was facing "increasing shortages and challenges."

The U.N. estimates that some 1.5 million people — more than two-thirds of Gaza's population — have fled the intense fighting in the north of Gaza to head south, but the road along the way was treacherous and full of tragedy.

"It was a very perilous journey, you know, moving out through areas where there was ongoing fighting to then, effectively to cross a front line into an Israeli-controlled zone," Thomas White, director of the U.N. agency that works in the Palestinian territories, UNRWA, told CBS News partner BBC News on Tuesday.

UNWRA is offering aid, including food and shelter, to people who do make it into southern Gaza, many of whom arrive with virtually no belongings of their own.

"They get south… You could literally see them sit on the side of the road, a sigh of relief. A sense of relief that they were out of the very active conflict zone. But then of course the question is: What next?" White said. "You know, 'I've arrived with a plastic bag of belongings, and I now need to find shelter somewhere. What does the future hold for me?' So, a lot of emotions for people leaving the north."

In:
• Hamas
• Israel
• Palestinians
• Gaza Strip

Haley Ott

Haley Ott is an international reporter for CBS News based in London.

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