World Health Organization (WHO) officials warn a humanitarian and health catastrophe is unfolding in the Gaza Strip as the humanitarian space for providing life-saving treatment and aid is shrinking. With no let-up in fighting across Gaza, the UN health agency pleaded on Tuesday for better access across the enclave, where aid deliveries are arriving “too little...too late”.
The warning and the appeal come as 1 percent of the Gaza population has been killed by Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) in just three months.
“At the same time that we are seeing this humanitarian catastrophe unfold before our eyes, we are seeing the health system collapse,” said Sean Casey, WHO Emergency Medical Teams Coordinator.
“Hospitals are closing, patients are lacking access to health facilities, health workers are being forced to flee for their safety,” he said, adding that people could be treated and lives could be saved, “if they had access to care.”
Casey, who has been in Gaza for the past five weeks, described seeing “a dramatic interruption in health services and a dramatic loss of access to health care workers.
“There are hundreds and thousands of patients awaiting surgery, and it continues to be a shrinking of humanitarian space, and a shrinking of health services across the Gaza Strip,” he said.
Speaking to journalists from Rafah Tuesday about a recent visit to Al-Aqsa Hospital, he described conditions there as shocking, with only a skeleton crew available to care for large numbers of sick and war-wounded.
"When I visited and walked through the emergency department, I saw once again as I have seen in hospitals across Gaza over the last five weeks, patients being cared for on the floor."
“When I was there on Sunday, it was mostly children with gunshot wounds, with shrapnel injuries. Children who were playing in the street when the building next to them exploded. They were waiting, in some cases an hour or more, just to be seen, with serious injuries bleeding on the floor and with just a handful of doctors and nurses there to care for them.”
Gaza officials say more than 23,000 Palestinians - 1 percent of the population - have been killed in the tiny territory, 70 percent of whom are women and children, since October 7. During the same period, more than 59,000 Palestinians have been reportedly injured.
“We are talking about 3.5 percent of the population very much directly affected,” said Rik Peeperkorn, WHO representative for the occupied Palestinian territory.
Speaking from Jerusalem, he said: "I want to say something also about the injured. We talk about multiple trauma cases, patients with multiple traumas, spinal trauma, terrible injuries, severe burns, amputees."
"I have never seen so many amputees in my life, including among children, which, if you think about it, not only the patients themselves, but the families and community means that this will have a long-term impact for everything."
Peeperkorn also described the difficulty of getting humanitarian supplies into Gaza, and the inability of getting humanitarian aid and workers within Gaza to reach people in need.
“As long as there is no cease-fire, humanitarian corridors are required within Gaza to make sure that aid gets through,” he said. “Hostilities and evacuation orders in neighborhoods of the middle area and Khan Younis, Gaza are affecting access to hospitals for patients and ambulances and making it incredibly complex for WHO to reach those hospitals to provide supplies and fuel.”
Peeperkorn said that every day, aid deliveries in Gaza were being denied. It was currently too ad hoc, too little, and too late, especially in the north. There were also concerns about law and order among the population.
The European Gaza Hospital, Nasser Medical Complex and Al-Aqsa Hosptial, he said, are near evacuation zones.
“These three hospitals are a lifeline in the south, where about two million people are present,” said Peeperkorn. “What we see is that the constricted flow of supplies and access, and the evacuation of medical staff from many hospitals due to fears for safety, is a recipe for disaster and makes more hospitals non-functional, as witnessed in the north.”
The WHO, which has documented 590 attacks on health care facilities in the occupied Palestinian territory since October 7, has been forced to cancel six planned missions to northern parts of the Gaza Strip since December 26. WHO has not been able to reach the north for two weeks. The organization has also reported that 304 attacks in the Gaza Strip have resulted in 606 fatalities and 774 injuries. The attacks have affected 94 health care facilities, including damage to 26 of 36 hospitals in Gaza.
According to the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), some 1.9 million people - more than 85 percent of the total population of Gaza - is internally displaced due to the attacks by the Israeli military or Israeli evacuation orders. Nearly 1.4 million civilians are sheltering in 155 UNRWA installations in increasingly dire conditions.
“Many have been displaced multiple times,” said the WHO’s Sean Casey. "Here in Rafah where I am, people are sleeping under tarpaulins, under makeshift tents, under incredibly crowded conditions."
“These people lack access to primary health care. There is no secondary or tertiary hospital close by that is accessible,” he added. “So, people are moving from one bad situation to another. There is no hospital in Gaza where you can go and expect to get care with certainty.”
Casey also said hospitals are bursting at the seams with patients suffering from hunger, numerous infectious and chronic diseases as well as horrific war injuries, many requiring surgery, including amputations.
Casey said that when patients do manage to reach a hospital there are so few medical professionals available that “their initial focus is damage control, which is keeping people alive.”
Since the start of hostilities, two thirds of hospitals in the Gaza Strip were forced to shut down due to the damage they sustained, lack of power and supplies or evacuation orders, increasing the pressure on the remaining health facilities that are still operational. Currently, only 13 out of 36 hospitals in the Gaza Strip are partially functional and able to admit new patients, although services are limited.
An estimated 50,000 pregnant women in the Gaza Strip, are in desperate need of prenatal and postnatal care. 350,000 people have non-communicable diseases and need access to medical care. In total, 155,000 pregnant women and breastfeeding mothers and more than 135,000 children under the age of two are highly vulnerable in the Gaza Strip.
The entire population of the Gaza Strip - more than 2.2 million people - is affected by acute hunger and is at immediate risk of famine. The bombardment, ground operations and siege of the entire population, combined with the restriction of humanitarian access, have led to catastrophic acute food insecurity, increasing the risk of famine every day. At least 500,000 people are already affected by catastrophic conditions.
On October 7, Palestinian armed groups in Gaza, including fighters from the militant Hamas group, launched thousands of rockets toward Israel and breached through a perimeter fence of Gaza at multiple locations. Members of armed groups entered into Israeli towns, communities, and military facilities near the Gaza Strip, killing and capturing Israeli forces and civilians.
More than 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals, most of them civilians, were reportedly killed and more than 5,400 injured, most of them on October 7. Some 240 people, including Israelis and foreign nationals, were held hostage in Gaza. More than 100 of the Israeli hostages have since been released, most of them during a weeklong truce agreement between Israel and Hamas.
Following heavy bombardments by Israeli Forces, from the air, sea and land, the humanitarian situation of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip drastically deteriorated. The merciless attacks by the IDF and the blockade imposed on Gaza by the Israeli government has led to a humanitarian catastrophe for the people of the tiny enclave.
The United Nations, humanitarian organizations, human rights organizations, and independent UN human rights experts have again and again called for the protection of civilians, an immediate ceasefire and the allowance of urgently needed humanitarian aid into Gaza, while a few influential governments – particularly the United States - continue to fuel the conflict and take no action to stop the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe in the territory.
Humanitarian organizations, human rights organizations, and legal experts have repeatedly said that the killing of thousands of innocent children and women, the siege on an entire civilian population, and the trapping of bombarded civilians behind closed borders in Gaza are crimes under international law. They demand accountability for the crimes committed against civilians in Gaza, from political and military leaders as well as those who provided arms and political or other support.
Some information for this report provided by VOA.