(United Nations) On Wednesday, the World Health Organization’s emergency aid coordinator described patients as “waiting to die” in Gaza hospitals that have become inoperable due to the war, in a statement to the United Nations headquarters in New York.
After spending five weeks in the Palestinian territories, Sean Casey, emergency coordinator for the World Health Organization, reported that he saw patients in hospital every day “suffering from severe burns or open fractures waiting hours or days” to receive treatment.
He added: “Often they would ask me for food or water, and this shows the level of desperation.”
Sean Casey said that he was only able to visit six of the 16 operating hospitals in Gaza, out of the 36 that were operating before the war.
“What I personally saw was a rapid deterioration in the health system,” he said in his testimony, also noting “the decline in the level of access to humanitarian aid, especially in the areas located in the northern part of the (Gaza) Strip.”
The official described: “We tried every day for seven days to deliver fuel and supplies to northern Gaza City.” “Every day we rejected these requests.”
Hospitals in Gaza receive a huge influx of patients while they can only rely on minimal staff, as caregivers have been displaced after fleeing their homes, like the majority of the population.
Mr. Casey said he saw patients in the northern Gaza Strip “waiting to die in a hospital without fuel, electricity or water.”
The war, which devastated the Palestinian territories and displaced more than 80% of the population, broke out after an unprecedented Hamas attack on October 7 in southern Israel, which left 1,140 people dead, most of them civilians, according to an Agence France-Presse tally based on official figures.
In response, Israel vowed to annihilate Hamas, which seized power in Gaza in 2007. According to the Hamas Ministry of Health, 24,448 people were killed in the attacks, the vast majority of them women, children and teenagers. And Israeli military operations in the Palestinian territories, where the United Nations referred to the “danger of famine” and “deadly epidemics.”
