UNITED NATIONS — Palestinians are dying every day in Gaza’s overwhelmed remaining hospitals which can’t deal with the tens of thousands people hurt in Israeli’s military offensive, a U.N. health emergency expert said Wednesday, while a doctor with the International Rescue Committee called the situation in Gaza’s hospitals the most extreme she had ever seen.
The two health professionals, who recently left Gaza after weeks working in hospitals there, described overwhelmed doctors trying to save the lives of thousands of wounded people amid collapsing hospitals that have turned into impromptu refugee camps.
The World Health Organization’s Sean Casey, who left Gaza recently after five weeks of trying to get more staff and supplies to the territory’s 16 partially functioning hospitals, told a U.N. news conference that he saw “a really horrifying situation in the hospitals” as the health system collapsed day by day.
“Literally five or six doctors or nurses” are seeing hundreds of patients a day, Casey said, most with life-threatening injuries, and there were “so many patients on the floor you could barely move without stepping on somebody’s hands or feet.”
Since Israel declared war against Hamas following its surprise attacks into the country’s south on Oct. 7, it has repeatedly accused the Islamic militant group of using Gaza’s hospitals as cover for military activities. It singled out Al-Shifa in Gaza City, saying Hamas had hidden command centers and bunkers underneath the hospital’s sprawling grounds. In late November, the Israeli military unveiled what it claimed was a Hamas military facility under the hospital.
At Al-Ahli Hospital, also in Gaza City, the situation was also dire, he said.
“I saw patients who were lying on church pews, basically waiting to die in a hospital that had no fuel, no power, no water, very little in the way of medical supplies and only a handful of staff remaining to take care of them,” he said.
Last week, Casey said, he visited the Nasser medical complex, the main hospital in Khan Younis, which is at 200% of its bed capacity with only 30% of its staff, so “patients are everywhere, in the corridors, on the floor.”
Even in Rafah in the south near the Egyptian border, where Israel has urged Gazans to move, Casey said the population has skyrocketed from 270,000 a few weeks ago to almost a million, and the city doesn’t have the health facilities to deal with the massive influx of displaced people.
Gaza historically had a strong health system with 36 hospitals, 25,000 health workers and many specialists, he said, but 85% of the territory’s 2.3 million people are now displaced, and that includes health workers, doctors, nurses, surgeons and administrative staff.
Casey said many of these medical professionals are in shelters, under plastic sheeting on streets in Rafah, and not in hospitals. One hospital director told him his plastic surgeon couldn’t do surgery because he was out collecting sticks to burn as firewood to cook food for his family.
“It’s really the overall package,” he said, saying medical supplies first need to overcome obstacles and inspections and get into Gaza, and then they need to get to the hospitals where they’re needed.
