MEDICAL SUPPLIES FOR PALESTINIANS AND HAMAS HOSTAGES ARRIVE IN GAZA
▶ World Health Organisation warns of ‘horrifying situation’ in hospitals amid struggle to treat victims of Israeli attacks
Medical aid for residents of the Gaza Strip and Israeli hostages held by Hamas entered the Palestinian enclave this week under an agreement brokered by Qatar and France, the first since a short-lived ceasefire in November.
The shipment is part of 61 tonnes of aid provided by the Gulf country, Qatar’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Majed Al Ansari said.
“Over the past few hours, medicine and aid entered the Gaza Strip, in implementation of the agreement announced yesterday for the benefit of civilians in the Strip, including hostages,” Mr Al Ansari wrote on social media platform X, formerly Twitter, on Wednesday night.
A senior Hamas figure, Mousa Abu Marzouq, said the deal stipulated that Gazans would receive “1,000 boxes of medicine for every box sent to an Israeli hostage”.
The delivery of medicine to Israeli hostages will be done through the International Committee of the Red Cross, Mr Marzouq said.
The Red Cross in Gaza could not be reached for comment due to communication disruptions in the enclave for a sixth consecutive day.
“The Red Cross will deliver medicines to four hospitals in Gaza,” for distribution to Palestinians and Israeli hostages, the Hamas official said on X.
Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Thursday, Israeli President Isaac Herzog said he had recently held “a closed meeting with Red Cross representatives in the region who met with hostage families and hostages
who have returned to discuss the dire medical situation of the hostages”.
On Wednesday, the World Health Organisation’s Sean Casey warned of “a really horrifying situation in the hospitals”, with Palestinians dying daily due to lack of treatment as medics struggle to deal with thousands of people injured in Israeli bombardments.
A doctor with the International Rescue Committee
called the situation in Gaza’s hospitals the most extreme she had ever seen.
Dr Seema Jilani, a paediatrician and the International Rescue Committee’s senior technical adviser for emergency health, previously worked in war zones including Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon.
“This is the most extreme situation I have seen in terms of scale, severity of injuries [and] number of children that have suffered that have nothing to do with any of this,” she said.
Mr Casey and Dr Jilani recently left Gaza after weeks working in hospitals there.
Mr Casey said Al Shifa Hospital, once Gaza’s leading medical centre with 700 beds, had been reduced to treating only emergency trauma victims and housing thousands of displaced people seeking shelter.
“Literally five or six doctors or nurses” are seeing hundreds of patients a day, Mr 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”.
The situation at Al Ahli Hospital, in Gaza city, is also dire.
“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,” Mr Casey said.
The death toll has passed 24,600 and more than 61,800 have been wounded since the war began on October 7.
Gaza’s Health Ministry warned this week that 350,000 patients with chronic illnesses had no access to medication.
Only 15 out of Gaza’s 36 hospitals are still partially functioning, nine in the south and six in the north, the WHO said.