Baghdad-INA
A World Health Organization official described “dire conditions” in Gaza Strip hospitals that remain operational as patients wait to “die” due to severe shortages of staff and supplies.
Emergency Medical Team Coordinator Sean Casey said that during the five weeks he spent in Gaza, he saw daily in hospitals “people with severe burns and multiple open fractures waiting hours or days” to receive treatment.
He added to reporters at the United Nations headquarters in New York, “They would often ask me for food or water… and this shows the level of desperation.”
He pointed out that he was able to visit 6 of the 16 operating hospitals in Gaza, out of the 36 medical centers that were operating in the Strip before the outbreak of the war.
He said, “What I personally saw was a rapid deterioration in the health system, in addition to a rapid increase in the level of humanitarian aid and the disappearance of the level of humanitarian aid entry, especially to the areas in the northern Gaza Strip.”
He described how he saw patients in the north “waiting to die in a hospital that lacked fuel, electricity and water.”
“Every day for seven days, we tried to deliver fuel and supplies to northern Gaza City,” Casey said, adding, “Every day, these requests for coordinated movements were rejected.”
Casey said hospitals are facing a flood of patients while operating with minimal staff, many of whom, like the vast majority of Gazans, have been displaced from their homes.
He added that hospital directors were telling him how their surgeons couldn’t perform surgeries because they were out collecting firewood to make fires and cook for their families.
The death toll in the Gaza Strip as a result of Zionist military operations since the start of the war rose to 24,448 martyrs, the majority of whom were women, boys and children, according to the latest toll of the Ministry of Health.
2024-01-18 07:18:45