Drone strike inside a Deir al-Balah hospital wounds three

Three Palestinians were wounded on Saturday when an Israeli drone fired inside the grounds of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, in the centre of the Gaza Strip. Eyewitnesses said the munition came down on a store of medicines on the hospital site, and that the three people hurt were patients who were being treated in the building at the time.

How much of the store was wrecked was not established in the hours after the strike. A second account of the same attack put the target elsewhere on the site, describing it as a tent pitched inside the hospital compound.

The Israeli army issued a statement about the strike on the compound, saying it had been aiming at a commander in the armed wing of Hamas.

Later in the day a drone struck an electric motorcycle in Tal al-Hawa, a neighbourhood southwest of Gaza City, killing one Palestinian and wounding two more. All three were taken to al-Quds Hospital.

A pharmacy store is not an outbuilding of a hospital. Al-Aqsa Martyrs is one of the few in the centre of the Strip still taking patients, and what it is able to treat on any given day is set by what is on its shelves rather than by the number of doctors on the ward. Stock that is destroyed inside the perimeter cannot be replaced from another building nearby, because there is no other building nearby holding any.

The three wounded were people who were already inside being cared for. A strike that lands within the walls does not have to reach the wards to change what the place is: it reaches the patients, and it reaches the medicines they were admitted to be given.

Palestinian medical sources put the number of people killed since the ceasefire took effect last October at about 1,313, with more than 4,361 wounded, and say the bodies of 815 people have been brought out from under the rubble in that time.