In early November 2023 airstrikes cut off oxygen supplies to the Al-Nasr Hospital in Gaza City. Israeli tanks had surrounded the hospital complex.  On November 10 Al-Nasr director Bakr Qaoud was warned by phone and text to evacuate the hospital or it would be bombarded.  In the final warning the staff was given a half-hour to leave. By international law hospitals cannot be a military targets, but faced with the Israeli threat hospital staff had no choice.  They prepared to leave.  However, there were five premature babies with special needs.  They needed care that couldn’t be provided during an evacuation.

Officials at the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), an arm of Israel’s defense ministry, were informed.  COGAT assured Director Qaoud that the babies would be taken care of.  So the doctors and nurses proceeded with the evacuation.

Two weeks later during the week-long truce a Palestinian journalist named Mohammed Baloush, who is employed by the UAE channel Al-Mashhad, entered the ward.  He found remains of the babies in the beds where they were left.  Their bodies had started to decompose.

 IDF Spokesperson Doron Spielman, speaking on Twitter dismissed the story as a “rumor”.  He said, “There were no premature babies that decomposed because of the IDF; there were probably no babies that decomposed whatsoever.”

There’s a crime within a crime here.  The criminal forcing of the closure of the hospital is compounded by the very at least the criminal negligence of COGAT. The deaths of those babies might have been deliberate with COGAT not even caring about what happened to them.

The Daily Mail(UK) and the Washington Post have reported on this apparent atrocity as has CNN and the Wall Street Journal.  Yet for some reason the New York Times has not.  A New York Times investigation needs to be done.  The Times could start by interviewing journalist Mohammed Baloush and doing it swiftly.  Upon returning to his home in Jabalyia Camp he was shot in his hip.  He says he was shot by an Israeli sniper. It is very possible he was targeted for revealing the horror of what happened in Al-Nasr hospital.