ISRAEL killed at least another 27 people in Gaza today, not including four Palestinian detainees who died in custody.

The total, reported by Gaza’s Health Ministry as fatalities resulting from direct Israeli military action, does not include either one-month-old Ali al-Batran, who died of hypothermia in Gaza City’s al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital the day after his twin brother froze to death. Ali is the sixth baby to have died from the winter cold amid the ongoing war.

Israel admitted having arrested the director of the Kamal Adwan hospital, the last in northern Gaza, when Israeli troops assaulted it on Friday. A photograph of Dr Hussam Abu Safia striding into the hospital ruins to look for patients or colleagues who had been unable to get out has gone viral, becoming a symbol of Palestinian courage.

Videos circulated on Israeli media have caught his frantic efforts to organise the removal of hundreds of patients that day after Israeli soldiers gave a 15-minute evacuation warning before they attacked.

Dr Abu Safia is being held at the Sde Teiman army base in Israel, according to US news organisation CNN. Israel said it suspected the hospital director of being a “Hamas terrorist operative.”

Amnesty International secretary-general Agnes Callamard called for his immediate unconditional release, praising him for “working under inhumane conditions, including following the killing of his son.”

World Health Organisation director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus added his voice to the demand, adding that “hospitals in Gaza have once again become battlegrounds” and calling for a halt.

Israel’s destruction of the hospital is the latest in a line of apparent war crimes in which medical facilities have been deliberately targeted. Last year, hundreds of bodies were found dumped in mass graves after Israeli troops ended occupations of the Nasser and al-Shifa hospitals.

France called on Israel today “to comply with international humanitarian law, which specifically provides for the protection of hospital infrastructure,” in response to the destruction of Kamal Adwan, while UN special rapporteur on Palestine Francesca Albanese appealed to medics internationally to sever all ties with Israel as a protest at its systematic demolition of Gaza’s healthcare system.

Destroying the Palestinian enclave’s hospitals was a “critical tool of [Israel’s] ongoing genocide,” Ms Albanese wrote on the X social media site.