The patients lie mostly inert in beds lined up in the hospital's reception, where staff moved them after an Israeli rocket crashed into the fourth floor.

The staff have appealed to international agencies for protection, and say the hospital is known to the Israeli army.

Shortly afterwards, the Israeli army contacted the hospital three times, saying everyone should be evacuated by morning as the air force was planning to intensify its air strikes.

Director Basman Alashi explained that the 14 patients in the facility, many of them paralyzed or in a coma, are in no position to be moved.

And even if they were, he said, there is no place to take them.

"There is no place safe in Gaza! If a hospital is not safe, where is?"

"We cannot leave our patients, they are helpless. They cannot move, they cannot walk, they cannot eat, they cannot even scratch their heads by themselves," he said.

Even as he spoke, the sound of shelling rattled the hospital windows.

More than 200 people have been killed in Gaza since the latest Israeli attack has begun in the early hours of July 8.

NTJ/NJF