“Israeli tanks are shelling the hospital, they have hit several of the floors, and several nurses have been injured,” director Basman Alashi told AFP.

The hospital in Gaza’s Shejaiya district has come under Israeli fire several times before, and the Israeli military has called on Alashi and other doctors to evacuate it.

Alashi told AFP on Wednesday that it was almost impossible to move the patients, most of whom are immobile, and he questioned where they could go.

“There is no place safe in Gaza! If a hospital is not safe, where is?” he said.

On Thursday night, he said he was contacting other hospitals in Gaza to try to arrange ambulances to transport the 14 patients elsewhere after Al-Wafa came under renewed Israeli fire.

“But the ambulances are all in use, there is heavy shelling in many places,” he said.

“And each patient has to be taken individually and carried because they cannot move.”

“They are tearing the hospital apart, bit by bit.”