Gaza hospitals shut down as deadly siege tightens

The health ministry in Gaza announced Tuesday that the generators have shut down in 16 primary care clinics and three major hospitals, but that medical staff have been ordered to stay at their posts and do what they can to assist patients.

On Tuesday, the UN humanitarian coordination agency OCHA warned that “emergency fuel for critical facilities in Gaza will become exhausted within the next 10 days,” unless donors step in to prevent a “humanitarian catastrophe.”

But for patients and medical personnel on the frontlines, the catastrophe is already happening, and it is only the latest chapter in the forced collapse of Gaza’s healthcare system.

At the al-Nasr children’s hospital, head of intensive care Dr. Raed Mahdi said that the lives of dozens of children in his unit are at risk.

According to the health ministry, Mahdi said overcrowding and pressure on medical staff and supplies had reached a crisis point at his hospital as children were being transferred there from other facilities that had lost all power.

At the Muhammad al-Durra hospital in eastern Gaza, named for a Palestinian child killed by Israeli forces in 2000 at the start of the second intifada, doctors said at a press conference Monday that entire departments had already shut down and some patients were being turned away.

Speaking at the press conference, Jamal al-Durra, Muhammad’s father, appealed for urgent international intervention, saying that to allow the crisis to continue would be to “kill my son a second time.”

“The imposed fuel crisis threatens dialysis services for 400 patients with kidney failure in the Gaza Strip,” the Palestinian human rights group Al-Haq also said Monday.

Due to the chronic power crisis, dialysis in Gaza is already a dangerous business.

Al-Haq added that Gaza hospitals are currently unable to carry out 200 operations per day “due to the corruption and subsequent waste of hundreds of units of blood because of the lack of cooling required – a consequence of the deliberately imposed electricity shortage on Gaza.”