Dwindling supplies, damaged hospitals in Gaza prompt growing calls for aid, ceasefire
Doctors at Gaza's largest hospital describe the 'true humanitarian and health-care catastrophe' unfolding
Days after a phone and internet blackout cut off people in the Gaza Strip from the world and each other, connections remain spotty. Meanwhile, one hospital sheltering thousands of injured and displaced Palestinians is running out of supplies and others are taking damage from bombardments.
According to Joseph Belliveau, executive director of Doctors Without Borders Canada, it has become more difficult to reach his colleagues working in Gaza since this past weekend.
He said a colleague working at Al-Shifa Hospital, the largest hospital in the Palestinian territory, described having to send messengers back and forth to summon doctors to surgical wards when communication lines were cut.
"Another colleague was also describing just how much intense pressure our colleagues have been under, working around the clock, completely exhausted, working in fear, working extremely worried about their families, not knowing how to reassure their children," Belliveau said.
This hospital is sheltering thousands of Palestinians who are wounded, in need of medical care, or displaced from their homes due to Israeli bombing of the densely populated Gaza Strip that has been ongoing since Oct. 7, when Hamas militants killed and kidnapped hundreds of Israelis.
In the past two days, bombs landing close to the Indonesia Hospital and Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital have damaged both. The latter is the only cancer centre in Gaza, and as of Wednesday is out of service due to damage from Israeli bombs and a lack of fuel, according to Doctors Without Borders.
"The bombardment caused great damage and put some electro-mechanical systems out of work," Dr. Sobi Skaik, director of the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital, told Reuters.
"It also endangered the lives of patients and medical teams."
Israeli officials say Hamas is using hospitals as command centres — a claim that was repeated at a United Nations Security Council emergency meeting Monday.
"Hamas ISIS terrorists are operating inside and under hospitals, including Shifa hospital, which houses their command centre," said Gilad Erdan, ambassador and permanent representative of Israel to the UN, after calling for the recognition of atrocities against Jewish people in Israel and around the world.
Inside Al-Shifa Hospital
According to the latest report from the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), 15 out of 35 hospitals in Gaza are no longer functioning. Belliveau says this is partly due to a lack of fuel.
"[At] some of the other hospitals that are still running, fuel supplies have been patchy," he said. "So there have been periods of time without generators functioning."
According to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry, 130 health workers have been killed and 57 health-care facilities hit in Gaza since Oct. 7. The latest update from the World Health Organization also notes that 28 ambulances are now unusable, either because of damage or lack of fuel, and private vehicles are being used to transport injured people to hospitals.
Dr. Hammam Alloh at Al-Shifa Hospital said self-inflating Ambu bags are used to manually keep people on ventilators alive temporarily when the power goes out. He said the Gaza Health Ministry has informed staff that a lack of fuel means electricity at the hospital will be cut off entirely within the next day. No fuel has been allowed to enter Gaza since the war began.
"This means people dependent on machines like ventilators will die in minutes," Alloh said. "People dependent on hemodialysis for kidney failure will die in about two days."
At the UN Security Council meeting, Erdan blamed the fuel crisis on Hamas, saying the group has been hoarding "roughly half a million litres of fuel" next to the Rafah crossing. "In any discussion about lack of fuel, your demands should be directed at Hamas," Erdan said.
Dr. Marwan Abusada, chief of surgery at Al-Shifa, said in addition to the wounded and patients needing regular care, the hospital is sheltering nearly 60,000 displaced Palestinians — a number also cited by Belliveau.
"We have observed many cases of diarrheal disease and upper respiratory tract infection and skin disease among displaced people," Abusada told CBC in a voice note on Monday. "We are in bad shortage of medical supplies and … essential needed drugs — for example, the anesthesia, antibiotics and painkillers."
Surgeries are being done in "brutal and archaic" ways, Belliveau said, citing a recent example of a nine-year-old boy who had to have his injured leg amputated on the hospital floor without proper sedation.
Alloh cited an instance in which a 21-year-old woman with a fungal infection died at the hospital because there was no antifungal medication available for her.
When asked about Israel's claims that Hamas is using Al-Shifa and other hospitals as command centres, Alloh said in his nearly two years of working at Al-Shifa, "I never saw anything like that to give me a clue of this." According to Belliveau, this claim amounts to a "menacing threat that a hospital could potentially become a target in this conflict."
Israeli airstrikes are so prevalent, Alloh said, that bombs can be heard almost every minute from Al-Shifa, and he can no longer differentiate which ones are landing close by.
"It's a true humanitarian and health-care catastrophe. It's worse than in the movies," he said.
According to the WHO, hospital bed occupancy at Al-Shifa is at 165 per cent, while the seven major hospitals in Gaza have an average bed occupancy of 119 per cent. "At least 117,000 [internally displaced people are] sheltering in 13 hospitals and other health care facilities, mainly in Gaza City and north Gaza," the statement says.
Mounting calls for more aid, ceasefire
As Palestinian and Israeli death tolls mount, calls for either a ceasefire or at least a humanitarian pause to allow more aid have been growing among international humanitarian groups.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday said Israel would not agree to a ceasefire and would pursue its plans to annihilate Hamas.
At the emergency United Nations Security Council meeting Monday, leaders of UNRWA, the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and UNICEF called attention to the dire humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
They called for the release of all hostages taken in Israel, asked for more aid to be allowed into Gaza, and warned of imminent crises.
"Only one desalination plant is operating at just five per cent capacity, while all six of Gaza's water-waste treatment plants are now non-operational due to a lack of fuel or power," said Catherine Russell, executive director of UNICEF.
"Unless access to clean water is urgently restored, more civilians, including children, will fall ill or die from dehydration or waterborne diseases."
Russell also called for a resolution that includes a ceasefire, echoing Save the Children — the group that called for an immediate ceasefire after stating that more children have died in the Gaza Strip over the last three weeks than in every other armed conflict annually since 2019.
The three groups at the UN Security Council meeting joined the WHO, Doctors Without Borders and others in stating that the amount of aid being allowed into Gaza through the Rafah border crossing with Egypt is not nearly enough to meet the needs of the besieged population.
The Gaza Strip has been under Israeli and Egyptian blockade for 17 years and, prior to Oct. 7, needed hundreds of aid trucks each day to meet their needs. No aid was allowed to cross into Gaza for the first two weeks after the Hamas attack. The border was reopened for some aid to enter on Oct. 21, and since then, 217 trucks have been allowed into Gaza.
"The system in place to allow aid into Gaza is geared to fail unless there is political will to make the flow of supplies meaningful, matching the unprecedented humanitarian needs," said Philippe Lazzarini, commissioner general of UNRWA, on Monday. To date, 70 UNRWA staff members have died in Gaza since Oct. 7.
According to Belliveau, Doctors Without Borders's aid trucks are part of a "huge waiting line" at Egypt's Rafah border crossing, waiting for an indefinite period to get into Gaza.
Doctors Without Borders does not typically call for a ceasefire in conflicts, Belliveau said, but they are doing so in this war as the "level of human cruelty" on display in Gaza — which has been subjected to three weeks of siege, constant bombardment, and calls for a million people to relocate from the north to the south — is "hard to find comparison to."
"What we normally call for is a space for humanity within a conflict," Belliveau said. "However, in this case, there is no space for that humanity [with] the way that this conflict is being conducted, so we're calling for a ceasefire."
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With files from Reuters