Shifa Hospital patients, staff and displaced leave the compound as Israel strikes targets in south

The military said it did not order any evacuation, and that medical personnel were being allowed to remain in the hospital to support patients who cannot be moved.

Patients, staff and displaced people left Gaza's largest hospital Saturday, health officials said, leaving behind only a skeleton crew to care for those too sick to move and Israeli forces who had taken over the facility earlier in the week.

The exodus from Shifa Hospital in Gaza City came the same day internet and phone service was restored to the Gaza Strip, ending a telecommunications blackout that forced the United Nations to shut down critical humanitarian aid deliveries because it was unable to coordinate its convoys.

In the south, an Israeli airstrike hit a residential building on the outskirts of the town of Khan Younis, killing at least 26 Palestinians, according to a doctor at the hospital where the bodies were taken.

Israel's military has been searching Shifa Hospital for traces of a Hamas command center that it alleges was located under the building — a claim Hamas and the hospital staff deny - and urging the several thousand people still there to leave.

On Saturday, the military said it had been asked by the hospital’s director to help those who would like to leave do so by a secure route.

The military said it did not order any evacuation, and that medical personnel were being allowed to remain in the hospital to support patients who cannot be moved.

But Medhat Abbas, a spokesman for the Health Ministry in Hamas-controlled Gaza, said the military had ordered the facility cleared, giving the hospital an hour to get people out.