GENEVA: There are no longer any functional hospitals in the north of the Gaza Strip, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said Thursday, describing “unbea­rable” scenes of largely abandoned patients begging for food and water.

The UN health agency said it had led missions to two badly damaged hospitals, Al Shifa and Al Ahli, in the north of the Palestinian territory on Wednesday.

“Our staff are running out of words to describe the beyond catastrophic situation facing remaining pati­ents and health workers,” said Richard Peeper­korn, the WHO representative for the occupied Palestinian territory.

His comment came amid increasingly frantic diploma­tic efforts to secure a pause in the war that Hamas says has already claimed 20,000 lives in Gaza, 70 per cent of them women and children.

Operation theatres at Al Ahli dysfunctional due to fuel shortage, lack of medical staff

WHO has already described Al Shifa, the largest hospital in Gaza which last month was the focus of an extended Israeli army operation and has been devastated by Israeli bombardments, as “a blood bath”.

The smaller Al Ahli hospital had since become the only place where surgeries were possible in the north, but its director said it had stopped operating on Tuesday after being stormed by the Israeli army.

Dying ‘slowly and painfully’

The WHO-led mission revealed that Al Ahli, which just two days ago was “overwhelmed with patients needing emergency care”, was now “a shell of a hospital”, Mr Peeperkorn told reporters in Geneva via video link from Jerusalem.

“There are no operating theatres anymore due to the lack of fuel, power, medical supplies and health workers, including surgeons and other specialists,” he added.

“It has completely stopped functioning.” Of Gaza’s original 36 hospitals, only nine are now partially functional, all of them in the south.

“There are no functional hospitals left in the north.” Hospitals, protected under international humanitarian law, have repeatedly been hit by Israeli strikes in Gaza since the war erupted.

Asked about the charge, Mr Peeperkorn said “we on our missions have not seen anything of this on the ground”, adding that WHO was “not in a position to assert how any hospital is being used”.

Wednesday’s mission intended to deliver fuel, but due to security concerns, only medical supplies were provided. However, without fuel and essential resources, the 10 staff at Al Ahli can’t adequately aid the 80 patients in the hospital, according to Peeperkorn.

‘Too late’

Sean Casey, a WHO Emergency Medical Teams coordinator who was on the mission, described “unbelievable conditions”.

At Al Ahli, the team had walked through the courtyard, where bodies wrapped in white plastic sheeting piled up, and with automatic gunfire sounding nearby, he told journalists, speaking from Rafah in southern Gaza.

In the church, “we found a really unbearable scene,” Casey said, describing around 30 patients, including young children and some with serious trauma wounds begging, not for care but for water.

“At the moment, it is a place where people are waiting to die.” He reiterated the increasingly urgent call for a ceasefire to allow sufficient amounts of aid in and also to evacuate more patients from Gaza.

Published in Dawn, December 22nd, 2023