Officials from the United Nations who carried out evacuation missions from Gaza’s Nasser Hospital have described “appalling” situations on the enclave’s second-largest medical facility, saying an Israeli army operation there has reworked a “place of healing” right into a “place of death”.
The feedback, in movies posted on-line on Wednesday, got here amid rising concern for the handfuls of sufferers and employees who stay trapped contained in the hospital amid intensified Israeli bombardment of the world.
The hospital, in Gaza’s Khan Younis metropolis, stopped functioning final week after a week-long Israeli siege adopted by a raid, in line with the World Health Organization (WHO). The world well being company, together with the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS), has to this point managed to evacuate some 32 important sufferers, together with injured kids and people with paralysis.
Jonathan Whittal, an OCHA official who took half within the evacuation missions on February 18 and 19, stated sufferers on the hospital have been in a “desperate situation” and have been trapped with out meals, water and electrical energy.
“The conditions are appalling. There are dead bodies in the corridors,” he stated. “This has become a place of death, not a place of healing.”
The rescue mission has beforehand stated they needed to navigate by way of pitch-black corridors with flashlights to search out sufferers towards a backdrop of gunfire. They needed to arrive on foot as a result of a deep, muddy ditch close to the hospital has made roads close to the positioning impassable.
“You can think about the worst situation ever. You multiply that by 10 and this is the worst situation I have seen in my life,” stated Julio Martinez, a WHO employees. “It’s the debris, it’s the light – working in the darkness. Patients everywhere.”
According to Palestinian well being authorities, a minimum of eight sufferers have already died on the facility, largely attributable to gas an absence of gas and oxygen. They say the lives of these remaining have been instantly threatened and accused Israeli forces of successfully changing the positioning into “military barracks”.
Chris Black, a WHO communications officer, stated the complete neighbourhood across the hospital has been “damaged and destroyed”.
“The hospital itself has no electricity, has no food, has no water,” he added.
The WHO stated some 130 severely injured sufferers and 15 medics stay on the web site.
Despite the determined state of affairs, docs and nurses on the hospital have been pleading not for evacuation, however for the capabilities of the hospital to be restored, in line with a former colleague of theirs.
“The last week has been miserable. It’s been a nightmare [for workers in the hospital]. The things they’re seeing are traumatising and they’re asking for some sort of help,” stated Dr Thaer Ahmad, a United States-based emergency doctor who spent a number of weeks volunteering on the Nasser Hospital in January.
“They’re asking, actually, not to be evacuated from the hospital but for the hospital to function. For the lights to be turned back on, for the medicine they need to treat the patients that remain,” he stated.
“I spoke to one of the last surgeons remaining there, who sent a message to a group of physicians here in the US, and he asked us to advocate for the patients who are there. He told us, ‘I’m staring at patients, and they need my help, they need my care, and there’s nothing that I can do’,” added Ahmad.
The WHO stated it was persevering with efforts to evacuate additional sufferers.
The company, in a press release earlier this week, described the dismantling and degradation of the Nasser Hospital – the most recent medical facility to grow to be a theatre of struggle within the battle between Israel and Hamas – as a “massive blow” to Gaza’s well being system. It stated the remaining services within the south have been “already operating well beyond maximum capacity” and barely in a position to obtain further sufferers.
According to the Palestinian Health Ministry, a minimum of 29,092 Palestinians, most of them ladies and youngsters, have been killed in Israeli assaults since October 7, when Hamas launched a shock assault inside southern Israel.
Some 1,139 folks have been killed within the Hamas assaults in Israel.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/2/22/israeli-siege-turns-gazas-nasser-hospital-into-a-place-of-death?traffic_source=rss
