GAZA — The largest hospital in the southern
Gaza Strip still
managing to function could be imperiled if bombardment and fighting come
closer, a senior UN official warned Tuesday.
اضافة اعلان
The fighting may make it impossible for either patients or
medical workers to get to Nasser Hospital in the city of
Khan Yunis, said Dr.
Rik Peeperkorn, the representative of the UN World Health Organization for Gaza
and the West Bank.
The influx of patients wounded in the Israeli assault has
already swelled the hospital to three times capacity, Peeperkorn said, and
recent evacuation orders issued by Israel forces for civilians north of Khan
Younis have raised concerns that the fighting may grow still worse in the area
near Nasser Hospital. On Tuesday, occupation forces said it would focus its
operations on Khan Younis, and also on other parts of southern and
central Gaza.
“If it becomes such a militarized zone,” Peeperkorn said,
“it will be impossible to bring medical supplies into the hospital.”
It is not just Nasser Hospital but Gaza’s whole medical
system that is “on its knees,” Peeperkorn said. In a video that Dr. Tedros
Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO chief, posted to social media Monday, an aid
worker at Al-Aqsa Hospital in central Gaza, Sean Casey, characterized the
emergency room there as “far, far beyond its basic capacity” and said that it
is impossible to keep up with “the scale of injuries, trauma and suffering
that’s coming through these doors 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”
The WHO has called repeatedly for a cease-fire in Gaza.
Short of that, Peeperkorn said, it is critical to at least establish a safe
corridor to bring in medical supplies and to evacuate patients. He described
conditions in the hospitals as worse than anything he had seen in Afghanistan
during that country’s long war.
“There is an enormous level of amputation, including among
children, spinal injuries, burns,” he said. “The effects long term will be on
the patients but also the caregivers.”
More than 20,000 people have been killed in Gaza since Oct.
7, and more than 50,000 have been injured, mostly in airstrikes.
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