The second largest hospital in the enclave is facing a fuel shortage, threatening the lives of people seeking care and shelter.
The Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS) says al-Quds hospital, Gaza’s second largest, has ceased operations due to fuel shortage as Israeli forces continue to bombard the besieged enclave .
“The hospital has been left to its own devices under continued Israeli bombardment, posing grave risks to medical staff, patients and displaced civilians,” the PRCS said in a statement on Sunday, intensifying Palestinian fears. who seek treatment and shelter there.
“This interruption of services is due to the depletion of available fuel and a power outage. Medical staff are doing their utmost to provide care to patients and the injured, even resorting to unconventional medical methods amid dire humanitarian circumstances and shortages of medical supplies, food and water,” PRCS said.
The organization said it held the international community and the signatories of the Fourth Geneva Convention responsible for the complete collapse of Gaza’s health system and the severe humanitarian crisis that resulted.
Tommaso Della Longa, spokesman for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, said al-Quds hospital has been cut off from the world for the past six to seven days.
“No in, no out,” the spokesperson said.
Al-Quds Hospital joins al-Shifa Hospital – another major health facility in northern Gaza – and is also now closed to new patients, with staff saying Israeli bombing and lack of fuel and medicine meant that those already being treated were at risk of death.
Hospitals in the north of the Palestinian enclave are blocked by Israeli forces and are barely able to treat the people there, medical staff said. More and more people are being killed and injured every day, but there are fewer and fewer places for the injured to go.
“My son was injured and there was not a single hospital where I could take him to be stitched up,” said Ahmed al-Kahlout, who was fleeing south on Israeli advice while fearing death. find no safe place in Gaza.
A plastic surgeon at al-Shifa hospital said the bombing of the building housing the incubators forced him to line up premature babies on regular beds, using what little energy was available to heat the air conditioning.
Gaza Health Ministry spokesman Ashraf al-Qudra said the Israeli fire was “terrorizing both medical officials and civilians.”
Israeli attacks have killed more than 11,000 people in Gaza in five weeks, most of them women and children.
