As the World Health Organization warns of an “imminent public health catastrophe” in Gaza amid Israeli attacks on medical workers and infrastructure, doctors and other frontline medics said Wednesday that only an immediate cease-fire would give them a fighting chance to save countless lives.
Responding Wednesday to the shutdown of the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital – Gaza’s only cancer treatment center – due to lack of fuel and damage from Israeli airstrikes, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that “no words can describe our concern for the patients who have just lost the only possibility to receive lifesaving cancer treatment or palliative care.”
Tedros added: “I urge and I plead – for full medical and fuel aid access NOW! The more we wait, the more we put these fragile lives at risk.”
The WHO chief’s plea came a day after Christian Lindmeier, a spokesperson for the Geneva-based United Nations agency, warned that “an imminent public health catastrophe… looms with the mass displacement, the overcrowding, the damage to water and sanitation infrastructure.”
🚨The Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital, the main cancer centre in the Gaza Strip, is no longer functional because of lack of fuel and damage due to airstrikes in its vicinity over the past 48 hours.@WHO calls for sustained access at scale for humanitarian aid –… pic.twitter.com/0MxMLJknVO
— WHO in occupied Palestinian territory (@WHOoPt) November 1, 2023
Meanwhile, James Elder, a spokesperson for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), said Tuesday that “child deaths due to dehydration, particularly infant deaths due to dehydration, are a growing threat.”
The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) called Gaza a “graveyard” for children, more than 3,600 of whom have been killed by Israeli bombardment, with another 1,000 minors reported missing, according to Palestinian and other officials.
Israeli forces have attacked numerous hospitals, clinics, ambulances, and medical workers, including the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital and al-Hilu Hospital. The Gaza Health Ministry said Wednesday that the bombardment that damaged al-Hilu “endangers the lives of women in the maternity wards and medical staff.”
According to an “urgent call for protecting healthcare workers in Gaza” published Tuesday in the British medical journal The Lancet, Israeli forces have attacked 57 medical facilities since launching the war on Gaza on October 7, killing 73 workers – including doctors, nurses, paramedics, and others – as of October 24. Sixteen of the medical personnel were killed while on duty.
We spoke with @GhassanAbuSitt1, a doctor who is operating inside Gaza – he's fearful of what is to come if fuel runs out in hospitals.
“Basically, without electricity, this hospital becomes a mass grave.” pic.twitter.com/yaDNHu1hpX
— AJ+ (@ajplus) October 31, 2023
As Israel’s bombardment of Gaza exacts a heavy toll on overwhelmed medical workers and infrastructure in the besieged strip, frontline medics like Dr. Noureddein al-Khateeb – a 38-year-old resident doctor in the emergency department at the Nasser Medical Center in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis – say they are living “in a constant state of threat and fear.”
“It’s constant fear on top of the exhaustion we’re experiencing,” al-Khateeb told The New Humanitarian on Wednesday. “But one shouldn’t think of that too much. I can’t. If I do, I won’t get any work done.”
Al-Khateeb added that “we’re also afraid for our families’ safety, but what can we do?”
Inside Gaza’s Nasser Hospital, healthcare workers suffer trauma, burnout, and loss
Medical staff must wrestle with the fear of not knowing if it will be their own loved-ones who are the next victims of Israeli airstrikes. https://t.co/PkxItCBDNl— The New Humanitarian (@newhumanitarian) November 1, 2023
Dr. Mohamed Abu Mousa, a radiologist at Nasser, said one of the few trips he’s made outside the hospital since Israeli bombardment began was to bury his 7-year-old son after he was killed in an October 15 Israeli airstrike on their family home.
“We don’t have the luxury of pausing to grieve,” he told The New Humanitarian. “The heartache is immense, but the wounded are endless. We have to keep going.”
Conditions are dire inside Gaza’s hospitals, which are running out of or low on fuel, medicines, equipment, and other essential services and supplies.
“We’re operating on children without anesthetics,” Léo Cans, who heads the Doctors Without Borders (MSF) mission in Palestine, told CNN Tuesday. “We don’t have morphine for them.”
"Doctors are distressed. They are calling us crying…by the horror they are seeing…This has to stop.
We're operating on children without anesthetics.
We don't have morphine for them."MSF's Leo Cans discussing Gaza on @cnni pic.twitter.com/az2ozu97SR
— Doctors w/o Borders (@MSF_USA) October 31, 2023
On Wednesday, MSF international president Dr. Christos Christou said in a video published on social media that “we’ve seen and heard the stories of the hell being unleashed on Gaza” as “helpless people are being subjected to horrific bombing” and “families have nowhere to run or hide.”
Christou continued:
So many people need help. What medical staff can do is just a drop in the ocean compared to the immense needs. Our teams working in Gaza are exhausted and terrified. Our staff tell us that pregnant women can’t get to hospitals to deliver. People are stuck under the rubble of shelled-out buildings. Children are having limbs amputated while lying on the floor.
“An immediate cease-fire is the only way the people of Gaza can find safety and the essential aid they urgently need,” Christou asserted. “The bombing, the all-out assault, needs to stop now… As a human being, I beg – stop the bombing and allow people in Gaza to live.”
“The bombing, the all-out assault, needs to stop. NOW.”
“As the president of a medical humanitarian organisation, I urge – implement an immediate ceasefire to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza.” – @DrChristou calls for an immediate ceasefire in #Gaza.
Watch: 📽️ pic.twitter.com/vaihcggRFM
— MSF International (@MSF) November 1, 2023
The Gaza Health Ministry said Wednesday afternoon that at least 8,796 Palestinians – including nearly 2,300 women and over 3,600 children – have been killed in Israeli attacks, while around 23,000 other people have been injured.
Brett Wilkins is is staff writer for Common Dreams. Based in San Francisco, his work covers issues of social justice, human rights and war and peace. This originally appeared at CommonDreams and is reprinted with the author’s permission.
Unbelievable. It’s embarrassing to be an American.
Deeply shameful. I am so angry and yet sad
October 26, 2023 All of Palestine is under attack
For many of us, it’s impossible to imagine the scale of death and destruction in Gaza. In just two weeks, the Israeli military has killed over 5,000 Palestinians in Gaza. Israeli warplanes have flattened entire neighborhoods. Shell-shocked children are left to search for their parents under the rubble. Millions of Palestinians have once again been made refugees, bombed as they tried to flee. Surgeons are operating by the light of their cellphones, increasingly without anesthesia. Let us be clear: This is genocide.
https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/2023/10/24/palestine-under-attack/
https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/settler-violence_NPR-1536×1024.jpeg
All of Palestine is under attack. Netanyahu is committing genocide there with a little help from his friends, especially Joe Biden.
Graham says “Kill Them All” about the Palestinians. He is like George Custer or whoever said “The Only Good Indian Is A Dead Indian”.
The doctors can’t do everything they need to do because of Israeli bombings. Israel says Hamas is using the hospital to launch attacks against Israel but has no way to prove it.
Just like Cast Lead. Does anyone remember that? The same methods used by Israel. Same lies.
Sorry, doctor. Not going to happen. The Zionists in Israel have a plan. It is to kill, kill, then kill more, then drive the remaining Palestinians into Egypt, into the Sinai desert to die.
The Israeli-Palestinian war is fast becoming the first mass genocide of the 21st Century, as shown on the TV screens everyday, all over the world.
The Netanyahu government and its fanatical religious factions are now reduced to bombing ambulances and hospitals, killing thousands of civilians, women and children. They are spreading destruction all around with no legal retribution or moral accountability whatsoever.
All this, while their complicit enablers in Washington DC, with blood on their hands, support and finance the killing enterprise with $billions of tax money, mumbling double talk, while crimes against humanity are being committed.
There is no justice in this lawless world and no democracy. Polls show that 66% percent of Americans of all persuasions want a cease-fire and an end to the massacres in Gaza,, but paid-for politicians, without an ounce of morality, do next to nothing to stop the mass killings. This is enough to make one spewing.
I guess that depends on how massive the mass has to be. The Islamic State certainly made a dent in the Yazidi population with its genocide attempt.
The Islamic State is a terrorist organization, which is outlawed by most countries.
It is not a state that has signed the UN Charter and which sits at the United Nations.
What, only recognized states can commit genocide? The Hutu militias in Rwanda will be glad to hear they’re off the hook.