“There are still 24 hours of water, electricity and fuel left” in Gaza and if aid does not arrive, doctors will only have to “prepare death certificates,” it said in a statement. Interview with AFP, the regional head of the World Health Organization (WER).
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The United Nations had long declared the Palestinian micro-territory “uninhabitable in 2020,” particularly due to the Israeli blockade that has been ongoing for more than 15 years. Today is a “full siege” by Israeli orders in response to the October 7 attack on Israeli soil by the Palestinian Hamas, which is in power in Gaza, in which more than 1,400 people were killed.
On the 10th day of incessant Israeli retaliatory bombing, Gaza and its 2.4 million residents, half of them children, face a “real catastrophe,” warns Ahmed Al-Mandhari, WHO’s Cairo-based director for the Eastern Mediterranean.
With around 2,750 dead and almost 10,000 injured, local authorities say everyone is overwhelmed, he says.
“Ventilators, dialysis, infants”
“Corpses cannot be adequately cared for” on the streets and in hospitals, “the operational services are completely busy: intensive care units, operating rooms, emergency services and others,” he explains.
Because they lack everything: “There is no clean water” and above all: “The WHO recorded that 111 medical infrastructures were attacked, 12 health leaders were killed and 60 ambulances were attacked,” it says, and “this contradicts . “International law and the principles of humanity”.
“In the northern Gaza Strip there are 22 hospitals treating more than 2,000 patients, some on ventilators, others requiring regular dialysis, children, infants and women,” he continued, pleading as the Israelis continue to urge Gazans to to leave the northern Gaza Strip towards the south of the territory.
Everywhere, from north to south, “medical reserves have all but dried up to the point where health care executives can now issue death certificates for patients,” Mr. Mandhari is alarmed.
“Doctors must now give priority to incoming patients. They have no other choice, there are too many people, so some have to die slowly,” he says again.
“According to the United Nations, the Red Cross and the Red Crescent, water, electricity and fuel will be available for another 24 hours, after which it will be a real disaster for all residents of the Gaza Strip.”
Relief workers are stranded in the desert
To save them, humanitarian aid must reach the Gaza Strip, where nearly a million residents are now displaced and a few have taken only a few belongings to sleep where they can, the United Nations and humanitarian workers say.
Planes flew from several countries, trucks from Egypt. But they all hit Al-Arich, the capital of North Sinai, the desert in northeastern Egypt that borders the Gaza Strip and Israel, without yet approaching the Gaza Strip.
Cairo announced that no foreigners would leave Gaza unless humanitarian aid first arrived. His Foreign Minister Sameh Choukri on Monday accused Israel of not sending a “signal” in the face of his “repeated” demands.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has been traveling through the region for several days and Washington has appointed an aid envoy to the Gaza Strip, David Satterfield.
Israel has control over all goods entering the Gaza Strip at all border crossings – as well as over people leaving and entering it.
On Tuesday, Martin Griffiths, the United Nations’ humanitarian emergency manager, will be in the Middle East to “assist with negotiations.”
“We are in intensive discussions with the Israelis, the Egyptians and others,” he assured.