There is enough fuel to run hospitals in the southern Gaza Strip for just three days, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) warns after Israeli forces took control of Gaza border crossing Rafah.
Israel sent ground troops and tanks into the town of Rafah on Tuesday and seized the nearby crossing into Egypt that is the main channel for delivering aid to the besieged Palestinian territory.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said fuel the U.N. health agency had hoped to enter on Wednesday had been blocked.
Israeli authorities control the flow of humanitarian aid to Gaza.
“The closure of the border post continues to prevent the UN from bringing in fuel. Without fuel, all humanitarian operations will stop. Border closures are also hampering the delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza,” Tedros said on X, formerly Twitter.
“Hospitals in southern Gaza have only three days of fuel left, meaning services could soon stop. »
Israel has threatened to carry out a major attack on Rafah to defeat the thousands of Hamas fighters it says are holed up there. But the city is also a refuge for more than 1.4 million Palestinians who fled fighting further north in the coastal enclave under previous Israeli evacuation orders.
They crowded into tent camps and makeshift shelters and suffered from lack of food, water and medicine. The main maternity ward in Rafah, where almost half of Gaza’s births take place, has stopped admitting patients, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) told the Reuters news agency.
UNFPA said the hospital, Al-Helal Al-Emairati Maternity Hospital, treated about 85 of the 180 births in Gaza every day before the Israeli incursion into the city.
Medical Aid for Palestine (MAP) said it received an update from Marwan Homs, director of Abu Youssef al-Najjar Hospital in Rafah, who said the facility was no longer operating because all staff had received orders to evacuate.
“It was the largest hospital in Rafah,” MAP said.
“This means that Rafah’s already overburdened and underfunded health system now only has the Kuwaiti Hospital, which is an NGO hospital with a capacity of approximately (a) 16 beds; the Marwani field hospital, which is only a trauma stabilization point; and Al-Emairati Hospital, which is only a maternity ward,” the statement added.
The dire warnings come as Palestinian officials in Gaza accuse Israel of deliberately cutting off aid into Gaza and targeting medical facilities.
Israeli forces are “deliberately worsening the humanitarian situation by interrupting the entry of humanitarian supplies from the Rafah and Karem Abu Salem border crossings, and targeting hospitals and schools in eastern Rafah,” said Salama Marouf, door – spokesperson for the Gaza government’s media office, to journalists, referring to the latter crossing by its Arabic name. It is also known as Kerem Shalom in Hebrew.
Israel says it is not limiting aid supplies to Gaza.
Hamas said its fighters were battling Israeli forces east of Rafah. The Israeli military said it had discovered Hamas infrastructure in several locations in eastern Rafah and was carrying out targeted raids on the Gaza side of the Rafah crossing and airstrikes across the Gaza Strip .
Israel has ordered tens of thousands of civilians, many of whom have already been uprooted several times, to an “extended humanitarian zone” in al-Mawasi, about 20 kilometers away. Rafah Mayor Ahmed Al-Sofi said the coastal area lacked all “the necessities of life”.
Residential neighborhoods, hospitals and schools where tens of thousands of people have sought refuge “are being targeted” by Israeli forces in Rafah, Maarouf said.
“The reality in eastern Rafah governorate indicates a real humanitarian catastrophe,” he said.
More than 35 Palestinians have been killed in the past 24 hours, according to health officials in the enclave.
Speaking alongside Maarouf, Khalil al-Daghran, a Gaza health ministry official, said the closure of the Rafah crossing prevented dozens of injured and sick Palestinians from leaving for treatment abroad. and those who were allowed by Egypt to leave Gaza on Tuesday. were prevented from doing so.
The situation for the sick and wounded in Gaza has been “very difficult” since the start of the Israeli assault due to a serious lack of medical supplies, al-Daghran said.
He called on the international community and the administration of US President Joe Biden to pressure Israel to end its assault and immediately reopen border crossings.
About 50,000 people have left Rafah since Monday, when the Israeli incursion began, an official with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) said.
UNRWA said an average of 200 people leave Rafah every hour – mainly to Deir el-Balah in central Gaza and the largely destroyed southern town of Khan Younis.