NEW YORK: There are no functioning hospitals in the north of Gaza and injured patients who need surgery and cannot be moved are ‘waiting to die’, the UN health agency; World Health Organization (WHO) said on Thursday, in a plea for a ceasefire to allow more aid into the shattered enclave.
The latest grave assessment from the World Health Organization (WHO) came after UN teams reached Al-Ahli Arab hospital and Al-Shifa hospital on Wednesday, amid reports of intensifying ground operations by Israeli forces and continuing airstrikes in the Gaza Strip.
‘Patients were crying out in pain, but they were also crying out for us to give them water,’ said WHO Emergency Medical Teams coordinator Sean Casey, describing the scene at Al Ahli Arab hospital, where medical staff were struggling to cope with ‘no food, no fuel, no water’.
‘It looks more like a hospice now than a hospital. But a hospice implies a level of care that the doctors and nurses are unable to provide…. It’s pretty unbearable to see somebody with casts
on multiple limbs, external fixator on multiple limbs, without drinking water and almost no IV fluids available,’ said WHO.
‘At the moment, it’s a place where people are waiting to die unless we are able to move them to a safer location where they can receive care.’
According to the UN health agency, only nine out of 36 health facilities in Gaza are partially functional; all of them are located in the south.
‘There are no operating theatres (in the north) anymore due to the lack of fuel, power, medical supplies and health workers, including surgeons and other specialists,’ said Richard Peeperkorn, WHO Representative and now acting UN humanitarian coordinator in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, speaking from Jerusalem.
At Al-Ahli Arab hospital approximately 10 staff – ‘all junior doctors and nurses’ – have continued to provide basic first aid to some 80 patients now sheltering in a church within the hospital grounds, Peeperkorn explained. ‘Some of them are severely injured and have been waiting for surg
ery for two weeks or have been operated on but are now at risk of post-operation infection due to lack of antibiotics and other drugs. All these patients cannot move and need to be transferred urgently, to have a chance to survive.’
‘The time is now. We are dealing with starving people now, adults, children, it’s unbearable. Everywhere we go, people are asking us for food even in the hospital, I walked around in the emergency department, somebody with an open bleeding wound, an open fracture; they asked for food. If that’s not an indicator of the desperation, I don’t know what is,’ said WHO Emergency Medical Teams coordinator Sean Casey
UN workers delivering medical supplies to the Al-Shifa Hospital in north Gaza on 16 December have described the emergency department as a ‘bloodbath’, with hundreds of injured people inside, and a constant flow of new patients.
Source: Palestine News and Information Agency – WAFA