It was early in the afternoon on Tuesday when a young man dressed head to toe in white PPE arrived at the entrance of Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, one of two hospitals in the city that was under a prolonged siege by the invading Israeli military. A band was tied around the man’s forehead and his hands were bound in front of his stomach.
In a video taken shortly after his arrival, his eyes are wide, dazed, and scared all at once. He had something to tell the thousands sheltering at the facility.
“Get out of the hospital, you need to get out of the hospital because they are going to blow it up.”A crowd gathered around, according to Mohammed El Helou, one of the only remaining Palestinian journalists in the hospital, and the young handcuffed man said that the Israeli military had sent him with a message.
“Get out of the hospital, you need to get out of the hospital because they are going to blow it up.”
Soon after following the same evacuation order he had transmitted, the man would be dead.
When El Helou woke up on Tuesday, news had already begun to spread in the Nasser Medical Complex that the Israeli military issued an order to evacuate the facility. (The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
The military had ordered an evacuation of Khan Younis in January as its ground offensive moved further south, but many people, including medical staff and patients, were unable to leave the hospital. The facility has also been a lifeline for displaced Palestinians with an estimated 10,000 people sheltering there.
The initial evacuation order was communicated directly from the military to the hospital administration, according to Khaled Al Serr, a doctor working in Nasser........