A Red Cross mission to assess the state of Gaza’s hospitals has described scenes of chaos and exhaustion in the face of a total blockade, a critical fuel shortage and relentless Israeli bombing.
Experts from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) focused their visit on Tuesday on two of the main medical centres in Gaza, al-Quds and al-Shifa hospitals, and experienced first-hand the intense bombardment of residential areas.
William Schomburg, the head of the ICRC mission in Gaza, said both hospitals “are rapidly running out of fuel and medical supplies”.
“There are hospital workers who have been personally impacted by the conflict and lots of them have been on shift around the clock. They have not been able to go home for several days, working really under the toughest and most unimaginable of conditions in scenes of utter chaos, frankly speaking,” Schomburg said. “We saw individuals with severe burn wounds, children who had lost their lives, a large number of women, older people, people with disabilities.”
As well as being packed with patients with severe injuries from bombings, the hospitals are functioning as shelters for thousands of people displaced from their homes, who “feel like they have nowhere else to go”, Schomburg said.
The UN says about 1.4 million of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents are now internally displaced. Nearly half of them have taken refuge in UN shelters, while the other half have found some floor space in other people’s homes, hospitals or public facilities. But that is no guarantee of safety.
“During our visit to al-Quds hospital there were heavy airstrikes all around us and the entire hospital shook,” Schomburg said. “Hospitals should be sanctuaries for the wounded and the sick, and at present these are places that do not feel protected for the people within them.”
The ICRC hospital visit confirmed the severity of the dearth of fuel for generators that power life-saving medical equipment and keep the lights on, as well as Gaza’s water system. The lack of water and sanitation is increasing the risk of an outbreak of cholera and other infectious diseases, piling a crisis on top of an emergency that many health workers fear is imminent.
The UN has said it will have to cease operations in the absence of new fuel deliveries, and the World Health Organization (WHO) has said that half of Gaza’s primary healthcare facilities, and roughly a third of its hospitals, have already ceased functioning.
Al-Awda hospital, the main maternity centre in northern Gaza, said it would have to stop services completely on Wednesday night in the absence of fuel, the charity ActionAid said.
The Israeli government has allowed a small number of trucks carrying humanitarian assistance to cross from Egypt but has insisted it will not allow fuel in.
The Israel Defence Forces’ spokesperson, R Adm Daniel Hagari, restated that policy on Tuesday night, arguing that Hamas had stolen fuel from the UN and should now provide it to hospitals.
Schomburg said redistributing existing stocks inside the besieged coastal strip would not address the severe shortages facing the population.
“Regardless of the politics of the situation, there is a basic reality that the fuel supply is finite, and there is a very limited storage capacity within the Gaza Strip, one of the most densely populated areas of land on Earth,” he said.
Schomburg warned that without an immediate lifting of the blockade on fuel and other humanitarian relief, “we are looking at a humanitarian emergency the scale of which I don’t think we have seen for a long time, and humanitarian agencies will not be equipped to respond to it”.
Each day, survival for people in Gaza is becoming more tenuous. In the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, people were lining up to buy bread on Wednesday.
“This is our life every day for the past two weeks: looking for bread, filling up with water when [the trucks] come every two days, listening to the radio trying to hear some news of what’s going on around us,” Mohammed Assar, a 58-year-old man in the queue, said. He added that a nearby generator rarely works any more, making it even harder to charge devices that are the last lines of communication with the outside world.
Rami, a 33-year-old man running a vegetable stall, said he went to local farms for produce to sell, but prices were rising because there were fewer and fewer people left to pick the local tomatoes, cucumbers, courgettes and green peppers.
He acknowledged that it was dangerous to be working outside, but said out that in current conditions in Gaza “we will die either from missiles or hunger”.
