Injured girl, 5, breaks down as she sees baby sister alive after Israeli bombing

‘My sister, my beloved,’ says Joury, a five-year-old Palestinian rescued from the rubble in Gaza after an Israeli bombardment.

Joury, her clothing tattered, had just been reunited with her 18-month-old sister Julia at a hospital in a wrenching moment captured by the BBC yesterday.

According to the broadcaster, Julia was also tugged out of the ruins of a flattened building in Rafah, 19 miles southwest of Gaza City, and was rushed to El-Najar Hospital.

Follow the latest updates from Israel-Palestine on our live blog

The video shows an International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement volunteer race into the hospital and hand Julia over to her family as Jourey lies on a hospital bed.

She cried the moment she saw her sister had survived the blasts.

The family were eating lunch when the building next to theirs was bombed by Israel, destroying their own house, their uncle said.

After being treated for their injuries, the girls were left ‘scared and traumatised’ by the incident, the BBC said, and have since left the hospital.

The El-Najar Hospital is a small medical facility with just 65 beds and nine beds in its emergency department.

It is one of 13 hospitals currently operational to some extent in Gaza, with 15 out of 35 hospitals and 51 out of 72 primary health centres closed, Palestinian state news agency WAFA reported.

The Gazan health ministry, run by Hamas, said yesterday that Israeli forces have so far killed 8,525 Palestinians – including 3,542 children – since October 7.

Around 1,400 Israelis have so far been killed and 5,431 injured in the conflict, according to Israeli official sources.

The UN has warned Gaza has become a ‘graveyard’ for children, with the death toll likely to rise as ‘millions of children are suffering without basic essentials’.

For those who do survive, the organisation said yesterday, they ‘face a lifetime of trauma’.

More than 21,500 civilians have been wounded, with the death and injured tallies expected to rise as 2,000 people are said to be buried under rubble, Gazan health officials added on Facebook.

A lack of fuel, food and water has been among the biggest worries for humanitarian groups working in Gaza.

Aid has slowly trickled into the 25-mile-long strip through the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, with 143 trucks allowed through the access point.

However, the OCHA, the UN’s natural disaster response agency, has warned this is a mere ‘fraction’ of what is needed. Fuel is ‘vital’ for Gazan civilians as it’s needed to power hospitals and water desalination plants.

A live camera directed at the border crossing by Reuters at the time of writing shows a convoy of Gaza Ministry of Health ambulances parked along the access point as limited evacuations of wounded Palestinians take place.

With fuel on the brink of drying up, the Gazan health ministry said the ‘countdown’ for the lights going off in hospitals, many housing thousands of displaced civilians, began yesterday.

The World Health Organization (WHO) says that it has documented 82 attacks on health in Gaza so far as Israeli officials issue evacuation orders.

Among them, the OCHA says, was an attack yesterday against the strip’s only hospital which offers cancer treatments, the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital, which was struck for the second night in a row.

But Gaza was once again plunged into darkness today after phone lines and internet services went down.

Gaza’s main mobile networks, Jawwal and Paltel, said today on X this was ‘due to international routes that were previously reconnected being cut off again’.

Sharing footage of a skyline in Gaza without a single light switched on, the allegedly Hamas-aligned Quds News Network said the blackout includes emergency services and civil defence lines.

Netblocks, an independent internet monitor, confirmed that Gaza is ‘in the midst of a new internet blackout’.

As the enclave’s main telecommunications provider, Paltel’s services being disrupted will mean ‘a total loss of telecommunications’ for most residents, the company said on X.

Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.

For more stories like this, check our news page.

MORE : Israel is at war with Hamas – here’s what we know about the militant group

MORE : Heartbreaking goodbye messages shared by gay Palestinians

MORE : Dozens killed after Israel bombs Palestinian refugee camps