2023-10-17 23:37:45
The World Health Organization said yesterday that it urgently needs to reach Gaza to deliver aid and medical supplies, and warned of a humanitarian crisis in the Strip, in light of the Gaza Ministry of Health announcing that the Strip’s hospitals “have entered the stage of actual collapse.”
In a speech to the media, Dr. Richard Brennan, Regional Emergency Director of the Eastern Mediterranean Office of the World Health Organization, said that the organization held meetings with “decision makers” yesterday, to provide access to Gaza as soon as possible.
Dr. Richard Peppercorn, the organization’s representative in the occupied Palestinian territories, said that 2,800 people have been killed and 11,000 injured in Gaza, half of them women and children, since the start of the Israeli air strikes. This number later rose to more than 3,000 dead and 12,000 wounded.
The Ministry of Health in Gaza announced that hospitals in the Strip “have entered the stage of actual collapse due to power outages and fuel scarcity.” It sent “an urgent distress call to all gas station owners and anyone who has any liter of diesel to contact it immediately in order to save the lives of the wounded and sick.”
Fuel reserves in hospitals are not expected to last more than a few hours. Therefore, some hospitals have reduced essential services, such as dialysis, to remain operational.
Given the collapse of almost all water and sanitation services in Gaza, the water, sanitation and hygiene group led by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said that residents are at risk of imminent death or the spread of infectious diseases.
Medical workers are suffering under severe bombardment and siege.
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