File photo: An Israeli main battle tank during an Israeli assault in central Gaza. AFP
"Israeli tanks have completely surrounded the hospital, cut off electricity and shelled the hospital, targeting the second and third floors with artillery," said the facility's director, Marwan Sultan.
"There are serious risks to medical staff and patients."
In a statement, the health ministry also said Israel had targeted the upper floors, adding there were "more than 40 patients and wounded in addition to the medical staff" present.
"Heavy gunfire" towards the hospital and its courtyard had sparked a "state of great panic" among patients and staff, it added.
On 6 October, Israel launched a new assault in northern Gaza, including around Jabalia, killing scores of people in one of the areas hit hardest by Israel's year-long deadly war.
Gaza's civil defence agency said an Israeli strike the night before in Jabalia killed 33 people.
The UN humanitarian affairs agency on Friday continued "to sound the alarm about the increasingly dire and dangerous situation that civilians in northern Gaza are facing. Families there are trying to survive in atrocious conditions, under heavy bombardment."
Doctors volunteering in north Gaza say the Israeli siege has made the situation so dire that "some days, the most you could do was hold people’s hand and watch them die."
"It never ends ... Every day you wake up to more and more of it, and that's just what makes it so horrifying," Dr. Samer Attar volunteering at Kamal Adwan hosptial told Democracy Now.
Meanwhile, an Israeli airstrike has just hit a residential building west of Al-Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza.
Palestine's UN envoy says the famine-stricken north is now experiencing a "genocide within a genocide."
Israel has so far killed more than 42,400 people in Gaza, mostly women and children, according to the territory's health ministry. The UN rights office confirms figures are accurate.
*This story was edited by Ahram Online.
Short link: