The thousands injured by relentless airstrikes need treatment; the health of many more is deteriorating sharply due to the lack of clean water, food and medicines; others have taken shelter in medical facilities in the belief that surely there, at least, they will be safe. But as the World Health Organization’s director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has warned, nowhere and no one is safe in Gaza. Israeli forces were on Monday night at the gates of al-Shifa, Gaza’s biggest hospital, which the WHO had already said was “not functioning as a hospital any more”. Another major site, al-Quds, had been forced to close to new patients amid Israeli airstrikes and heavy fighting.
More than 11,000 are dead in Gaza, two-thirds of them women and children, according to its health ministry. While Israel casts doubt on figures from the Hamas-run ministry, one Biden administration official has said the tally could be even higher than cited. More than 100 UN employees are among the dead. An estimated 70% of the 2m population are displaced. One Israeli minister spoke of “Gaza’s Nakba”, a reference to the expulsion and dispossession of Palestinians in 1948. But though the suffering extends far beyond the walls of these hospitals, they have come to epitomise it.
