Dubai:

The only cancer treatment hospital in the Gaza Strip has gone out of service after it ran out of fuel, health officials said today.

The director of the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship hospital told a press conference aired by Al-Jazeera TV that the hospital, which mainly treats cancer patients, had used up its fuel and was now out of service.

“We tell the world don’t leave cancer patients to a certain death due to the hospital being out of service,” the director, Subhi Skaik, added.

Palestinian Health Minister Mai al-Kaila confirmed the director’s remarks in a statement, adding that this brings the total number of hospitals not operating right now in the Strip to 16 out of 35.

“The lives of 70 cancer patients inside the hospital are seriously threatened,” she said in a statement.

“The number of cancer patients in the Gaza Strip is about 2,000 living in catastrophic health conditions as a result of the ongoing Israeli aggression on the Strip and the displacement of a large number,” al-Kaila added.

After fighters of the Palestinian group Hamas attacked southern Israel on Oct. 7, killing 1,400 people, Israel responded with a total blockade of Gaza, heavy bombardment and a ground operation.

Israel has vowed to wipe out Hamas. But the desperate humanitarian conditions have caused great concern across the world as food, fuel, drinking water and medicine run short and hospitals struggle to treat casualties.

The death number in Gaza reached 8,796 Palestinians, including 3,648 children today, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-controlled enclave.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

As the Israel-Hamas war continues to escalate, a doctor based in Gaza revealed a horrifying ordeal of the time when he was working in the operation theatre and the entire ceiling of the operation theatre fell on them after the hospital was hit by a deadly explosion on Tuesday night. Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a plastic surgeon from London, said that parts of the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City were on fire.

“I was in the operating room when the missile struck and the full ceiling of the operating cell fell on us. There were amputated parts. There were people with primary amputations,” he told the BBC.

He added, “40% of all the cases that I’ve seen have been children. A lot of them have been like this, they have lost one or two parents. And unfortunately, these kids have a long, long recovery road in front of them.”

Describing the scene as a “massacre”, he stated, “There’s broken glass everywhere, there are lots of people who are seeking refuge in the hospital.”

The surgeon further informed that water pressure was currently too low to power some of the equipment and that resources were running out quickly.

A strike on the Gaza hospital compound which health officials there said killed at least 500 people, on Tuesday, has sparked outrage around the globe. While the Palestine group Hamas has blamed Israel for the deadly strike, the Israeli Army said the hospital was hit by a rocket misfired by Islamic Jihad, an ally of the Hamas group. Following the hospital bombing, US President Joe Biden, who arrived in Israel that day, spoke with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “I am outraged and deeply saddened by the explosion at the Al-Ahli Arab hospital in Gaza and the terrible loss of life that resulted,” Biden said in a statement.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) termed the hospital strike as “unprecedented in its scale”, adding that 115 healthcare facilities in Gaza have been attacked, leaving most of the city’s hospitals out of operation.