The largest hospital in Gaza city says it fears running out of fuel today, and that Gaza’s medical sector could collapse within hours, even as the overwhelmed hospital is stretched far beyond capacity.
Director of the Al Shifa hospital, Mohammed Abu Selmia, told Associated Press: “We are squeezing five beds into a single tiny room. We need equipment, we need medicine, we need beds, we need everything.”
Two days after the Hamas attacks which left up 1,300 people dead, Israel announced a total blockade on Gaza, saying there will be “no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed”. The packed, narrow strip which is home to 2 million people is now running out of fresh water as well as fuel.
The U.N. Office of Humanitarian Affairs said Monday that without fuel, “the lives of thousands of patients” are at risk, especially those admitted to intensive care units, newborns in incubators and patients requiring dialysis.
The Al Shifa hospital has been placed under further strain following last night’s explosion at the al-Ahli hospital where hundreds were claimed to have died.
Mr Selmia told Associated Press that medical staff were seeing horrific injuries.
“They are all in a terrible situation,” he said. “A young woman whose limbs were amputated, a child whose intestines came out, many others have had limb amputations, bleeding in the brain, bleeding in the liver and spleen.”
Doctors were performing operations on the floor without anesthesia and a shortage of essential medical supplies was an urgent issue, he said, adding that even if services were forced to shutdown doctors would “remain with the sick and wounded.”
“We need equipment, we need medicine, we need beds, we need anesthesia, we need everything,” Abu Selmia told Associated Press.
Five days ago, BBC reported that in Al Shifa hospital “the hallways and courtyards are filled with hundreds of bodies, as the morgue’s refrigerators cannot hold them all. More bodies still lie outside.”
Inside, hundreds of seriously injured people fill the hallways as staff work under immense pressure, knowing that all services might soon grind to a halt if its back-up generators stop working. Women and children are among the wounded.
This could lead to a serious catastrophe.
The UN health agency WHO, warned prior to the Al Shifa explosion that hospitals in Gaza are “at a breaking point.”
“Hospitals have just a few hours of electricity each day and are being forced to ration depleting fuel reserves to sustain just the most critical functions in overcrowded treatment areas,” WHO said.
Acute shortages of medial supplies are compounding the crisis, limiting the response capacity, it added.
Earlier this week, officials at Shifa hospital described the order by the Israeli Defence Forces for a million people to move to the south of Gaza as impossible, the Times of Israel reported.
Mr Selmia estimated that 40,000 displaced civilians were sitting under the trees in the empty grounds surrounding the hospital, as well as inside the building’s lobby and corridors, hoping they would be protected there from the fighting.
Israel says it will lift the siege if Hamas releases the almost 200 hostages it seized in the deadly incursion on October 7th.
It says the war against Gaza is retaliation to the worst attacks on is citizens in 50 years, describing the incursion as ‘Israel’s 9/11’.
Photo details: Palestinians carry the body of a 3-year-old child, Amir Qanan, who was killed after an Israeli air strike on his home, in the city of Khan Yunis, southern of the Gaza Strip, on October 10 2023. C: Shutterstock / Anas-Mohammed