Men carry on a stretcher the body of a victim that was rescued from the rubble following Israeli bombardment on the four-storey Muqat family house in the Zarqa neighbourhood in the north of Gaza City on October 26, 2024.
| Photo Credit: AFP

The World Health Organization chief warned Saturday (October 26, 2024) of a disastrous situation in the north of the war-ravaged Gaza Strip, with “intensive military operations unfolding around and within healthcare facilities”.

“The situation in northern Gaza is catastrophic,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on X, warning that “a critical shortage of medical supplies, compounded by severely limited access, are depriving people of life saving care”.

He pointed in particular to the situation at Kamal Adwan, northern Gaza’s last functioning hospital, which was stormed by Israeli forces on Friday, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.

The Ministry charged that the raid on the facility in the Jabalia camp, where Israel launched a major operation earlier this month, left two children dead.

And it accused the Israeli forces of detaining hundreds of staff, patients and displaced people during the raid.

The Israeli military said its forces were operating around Kamal Adwan, but was “not aware of live fire and strikes in the area of the hospital”.

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Mr. Tedros said Saturday (October 26, 2024) that the Gaza Health Ministry had informed WHO, which had temporarily lost contact with its staff at the hospital amid the chaos, that the siege had ended.

“But it came at a heavy cost,” he said.

Late Friday (October 25, 2024), WHO said three health workers and another employee were injured in the assault and that dozens of health workers were detained at the hospital, where around 600 patients, health workers and others were sheltering.

“Following the detention of 44 male staff members, only female staff, the hospital director, and one male doctor are left to care for nearly 200 patients in desperate need of medical attention,” Mr. Tedros said Saturday (October 26, 2024).

“Reports of the hospital facilities and medical supplies being damaged or destroyed during the siege are deplorable,” he said.

Mr. Tedros lamented that “the whole health system in Gaza has been under attack for over a year”, since Hamas’s October 7 attacks inside Israel last year sparked the war.

That attack resulted in the deaths of 1,206 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.

Dozens of hostages seized on that day are still held by militants in Gaza.

Israel’s retaliatory campaign has killed 42,924 people in Gaza, the majority civilians, according to figures from the Hamas-run territory’s Health Ministry which the United Nations considers reliable.

“WHO cannot stress loudly enough that hospitals must be shielded from conflict at all times,” Mr. Tedros said, stressing that “any attack of healthcare facilities is a violation of international humanitarian law”.

“The only path to safeguarding what remains of Gaza’s collapsing health care system is an immediate and unconditional ceasefire.”