The World Health Organization stressed that it “cannot afford” to lose the remaining functioning hospitals in southern Gaza, warning that the Strip’s health care sector is collapsing “at a rapid pace.”
As Israeli calls for evacuations continue to push people into the south of the Strip, the World Health Organization said they have strained already strained facilities in the area. Shaun Casey, coordinator of the World Health Organization’s emergency medical team, said at a press conference on Tuesday that the region’s hospitals were “now filling up with patients” and internally displaced people.
Only 13 out of 36 hospitals in Gaza are partially operational, and the bed occupancy rate is 351%, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Ramallah.
Casey, who has conducted a number of WHO missions to Gaza hospitals, described the “intensification of hostilities” around the European Hospital in the southern city of Khan Yunis as “really worrying.”
Casey stressed, “We cannot lose health facilities. They must definitely be protected. This is the last line of secondary health care in Gaza from north to south.”
“We cannot afford to lose any hospital,” Richard Peppercorn, WHO representative in the occupied Palestinian territories, said at the press conference.
