Out of the 36 hospitals in Gaza, only 13 are partially functioning according to the World Health Organization.
Electronic Intifada
Israel continues to attack patients, physicians and hospitals across the Gaza Strip.
On Wednesday, the World Health Organization stated that only 13 hospitals – out of 36, before Israel’s genocidal attacks – are partially functioning. Two hospitals are “minimally functioning,” the WHO assessed, leaving 21 completely out of service.
One of the partially-functioning hospitals is the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, in the south, which is stretched beyond its capacity. The hospital’s immediate vicinity has been repeatedly bombed.
As Israeli attacks “intensify near the hospital, ambulances, patients, staff and WHO and partners will be unable to reach the complex, and this key hospital will quickly become barely functional,” warned Dr. Rik Peeperkorn, a WHO official.
“This scenario was witnessed all too often in the north. Gaza can not afford to lose any more hospitals,” Peeperkorn added.
More than 100 ambulances have been destroyed, the health ministry reports.
One physician at a field hospital, set up inside a school in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza, only has gauze and disinfectant for treating patients, according to Reuters.
Patients, he explained, are suffering from infections due to a lack of sterilization and sanitizing equipment.
Serial targeting of Al-Amal Hospital
On Thursday, Al-Amal Hospital in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, was targeted for the fifth time in less than a week.
A video shows PRCS staff receiving wounded persons after Israel bombarded residential apartments adjacent to the hospital grounds on Thursday morning.
The PRCS added that the Israeli shelling also damaged the radio communication network, “the only means of communication” the service has left, which now “poses a great challenge for emergency crews in reaching the wounded and sick.”
On 24 December, an Israeli sniper drone targeted and killed a 13-year-old boy while he was playing with his cousins inside a room at the PRCS facility at Al-Amal Hospital.
Israel abducts, tortures physicians
Meanwhile, the Israeli army has detained around 100 health personnel, according to the Palestinian health ministry, since 7 October.
Doctors, medical workers and hospital directors are being held “in harsh conditions of torture, starvation and exposure to extreme cold,” the ministry stated.
On Wednesday, Francesca Albanese, the UN’s special rapporteur for the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, excoriated Israel over the destruction of hospitals and the kidnapping and torturing of medical personnel.
Awni Khattab, the director of the PRCS ambulance center in Khan Younis, was taken and detained by Israeli forces more than a month ago while he was transferring injured patients from al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City to the southern Gaza Strip.
The day of reckoning will come for the ‘chosen’ Assassins, and it will be dreadful.
And it will come as well for all those nations who could have raised their voices in defense of the People of Palestine, yet CHOSE to remain silent, each for their own unspeakable, ugly reasons.
The article ends with the Palestine Red Crescent Society urging the International Community to ‘exert pressure on the occupation authorities…’
… Yes we have been waiting for months on end to to see a substantive intervention on the part of powerful leaders, but their silence is deafening…