DEIR AL BALAH, Gaza Strip — Israel’s army detained the director of one of northern Gaza ‘s last functioning hospitals as overnight strikes elsewhere in the territory killed nine people, including children, Palestinian medical officials said Saturday.

Israel’s military alleged that Hamas militants were using the facility and said more than 240 people were detained.

Gaza’s Health Ministry said Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, was arrested Friday along with dozens of other staff and taken to an interrogation center. The ministry said Israeli troops stormed the hospital and forced many staff and patients outside and told them to strip in winter weather, according to the ministry.

Israel’s military Saturday confirmed it detained the hospital director for questioning and called him a suspected Hamas operative while providing no evidence. It said it encircled the hospital and special forces entered and found weapons in the area. It said militants fired on its forces and they were “eliminated.”

An Israeli military spokesman, Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, later asserted that most of those detained are Hamas operatives.

On Friday, the military denied it had entered or set fire to the hospital complex but acknowledged it had ordered people outside. The military repeated claims that Hamas militants operate inside Kamal Adwan, which hospital officials have denied.

The hospital has been hit multiple times over the past three months by Israeli troops waging an offensive in largely isolated northern Gaza against Hamas fighters it says have regrouped.

MedGlobal, the humanitarian organization for which Abu Safiya worked, said it was gravely concerned about him. It said the incident follows the October detention of five other staffers, calling it an “alarming and egregious pattern of targeting medical personnel and spaces.”

Israel’s nearly 15-month-old campaign of bombardment and ground offensives has devastated Gaza’s health sector. The World Health Organization has said the raid on Kamal Adwan has put northern Gaza’s last major health facility “out of service” after growing restrictions on access, adding that “this horror must end and health care must be protected.”

The Health Ministry said conditions for Kamal Adwan patients who were relocated to the damaged Indonesian Hospital nearby — also raided in the past — were “extremely difficult.”

The Israeli military statement Saturday said 350 patients along with medical personnel had been evacuated from Kamal Adwan in recent weeks, and another 95 patients, caregivers and medical personnel were evacuated to the Indonesian Hospital during the operation.

The war has killed more than 45,400 Palestinians and wounded more than 108,000 others, according to the Health Ministry. Its count does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.

Since October, Israel’s offensive has virtually sealed off the northern Gaza areas of Jabaliya, Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahiya. Tens of thousands of Palestinians were forced out but thousands are believed to remain in the area where Kamal Adwan and two other hospitals are located.

Israel has vowed to destroy Hamas after the militants’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel in which they killed roughly 1,200 people and abducted some 250 others. Some 100 Israelis remain captive in Gaza, and around a third are believed to be dead.

Israel continued attacks Saturday across Gaza.

The Health Ministry said Saturday that 48 people had been killed in the past 24 hours by Israeli fire.

Meanwhile, in Lebanon, Syria’s Embassy suspended consular services Saturday, a day after two relatives of deposed Syrian President Bashar Assad were arrested at the Beirut airport with allegedly forged passports.

Two Lebanese security officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the suspension was ordered because the passports belonging to Assad’s relatives — the wife and daughter of one of his cousins — were believed to have been forged at the embassy.

Assad’s uncle, Rifaat Assad — who has been indicted in Switzerland on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity — had flown out the day before using his real passport and was not stopped, the officials said.

The U.K.-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported Saturday that 70 Syrians, including former army officers, were handed over by a Lebanese security delegation to the security forces of the new Syrian government, led by the former insurgent group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS.