Gaza’s sick and injured face new attacks on health care, lethal evacuation delays – UN humanitarians

Amid reports of a new Israeli military raid on a Gaza hospital on Friday morning - and ongoing hostilities hindering polio vaccination in the north of the Strip - UN humanitarians pleaded again for the protection of health facilities and urgent medical evacuation of critically ill patients.

Dr. Rik Peeperkorn, the UN World Health Organization (WHO’s) representative for the Occupied Palestinian Territory, just back in central Gaza from a “complex mission” to the embattled Kamal Adwan hospital in the north, provided journalists in Geneva with an eyewitness account of what he had seen.

At a checkpoint close to Kamal Adwan, he said, there were “thousands of women and children, leaving the area, walking, limping, with a few belongings, towards Salah al-Din and… Gaza City."

The UN health agency official said that on Thursday, WHO and partners managed “amid ongoing hostilities” to reach Kamal Adwan hospital, which Dr. Peeperkorn described as “minimally functional,” and succeeded in transferring 23 patients and their caregivers to Al Shifa hospital in Gaza City, also delivering supplies and medicines.

At Kamal Adwan hospital “we saw mayhem and chaos,” he said, adding that during his last visit there, the facility had 75 to 100 patients.

“Now, there were probably more than 200 patients. The emergency ward was overflowing, and we saw numerous patients being brought in… horrific trauma patients.”

Dr. Peeperkorn stressed that the staff of the hospital were “overwhelmed” and underequipped to deal with the inflow of heavily injured patients.

“We also saw hundreds of people in every corner of the hospital seeking shelter,” he said. “And we want to stress again, this hospital, it needs to be protected.”

The WHO official also addressed “very concerning” reports received on Friday morning, hours after he and his colleagues had left Kamal Adwan, about Israeli military presence in the vicinity of the hospital and orders for the displaced to “come out”. The information needed to be confirmed, he said, insisting that people who shelter there have “nowhere to go.”

In a post on X on Friday afternoon, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus wrote that “since this morning’s reports of a raid of Kamal Adwan hospital… we have lost touch with the personnel there,” calling the development “deeply disturbing.”

Turning to the UN-run polio vaccination campaign in the war-torn enclave, Dr. Peeperkorn recalled that on Wednesday the health authorities and agencies involved in the campaign announced the postponement of its third and final phase aiming to vaccinate 119,279 children under 10 in the north of the Strip.

This was due to “escalating violence, intense bombardment, mass displacement orders, and lack of humanitarian pauses” across most of northern Gaza.

According to WHO “ongoing attacks on civilian infrastructure” were making it “impossible for families to safely bring their children for vaccination, and health workers to operate”.

Children across northern Gaza were to be vaccinated with a second dose of the novel oral polio vaccine type 2, following a first round conducted across the Strip last month. According to WHO, to interrupt poliovirus transmission “at least 90 per cent of all children in every community and neighbourhood must be vaccinated”.

“We want to cover these 119,000 children in the north as well, as we did in the first round,” Dr. Peeperkorn said, stressing the need for “access to all children, wherever they are, to make sure that you get to this 90 per cent coverage”.

“And we are almost there,” he insisted, adding that he still had “good hopes” regarding the feasibility of the final stretch of the campaign to protect children from the paralysis-inducing virus.

Time and time again, humanitarians have underscored the horrific suffering that children in the Strip have endured since Israel launched its offensive in Gaza following the Hamas attacks in southern Israel on 7 October last year.

UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) spokesperson James Elder gave evidence of how the plight of Gazan children is being compounded by a drastic drop off in medical evacuations, leaving youngsters with “head trauma, amputations, burns, cancer, severe malnutrition,” and waiting for the slimmest chance to leave the Strip for treatment.

From the beginning of the year until the closing of the Rafah border crossing with Egypt in early May (due to Israel’s military offensive there), there had been a monthly average of 296 children medically evacuated out of the enclave, he said. But since then, that number “has collapsed to 22 per month.”

At this pace, it would take more than seven years to evacuate the 2,500 children needing urgent medical care, Mr. Elder warned, adding that COGAT, the Israeli entity responsible for humanitarian affairs in the occupied Gaza Strip, “does not provide reasons for refusals.”

“It is not known how many child patients have been rejected for medical evacuation,” the UNICEF spokesperson said. “Only a list of approved patients is provided by Israel’s COGAT, which controls Gaza’s entry and exit points. The status of others is not shared.”

When a patient is denied evacuation, “there is nothing that can be done,” Mr. Elder stressed. “Trapped in the grip of an indifferent bureaucracy, children’s pain is brutally compounded.”

The UNICEF spokesperson insisted that children “are being denied medical care that is a basic human right, and those who barely survive the ruthless bombardments are then condemned to die from their injuries”. Far from being a logistical or capacity problem, “it is simply a problem that is being completely disregarded,” he deplored.

Meanwhile in Lebanon, where a massive displacement crisis continues to unfold, the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) reported that Israeli airstrikes hit two border crossings with Syria on Friday.

UNHCR Senior Communications Advisor Rula Amin told journalists that the “Joussieh border crossing in the northern part of Al Masnaa border crossing” was hit, “and this happened less than 500 metres away from the immigration office”.

“You can see the crater and UNHCR rubb halls [tents] that we had established for people to be able to stay there in the shade while they are being processed.”

There was another airstrike at Al Masnaa border crossing, the main crossing point between Lebanon and Syria, she said, stressing that the airstrikes put at risk a “lifeline” for those fleeing their homes: for many, this is the only available escape route out of the country.

Over 430,000 people have crossed from Lebanon to Syria so far, Ms. Amin said, 70 per cent of them Syrians who had fled the conflict in their own country.

She pointed to “another emergency and humanitarian catastrophe” unfolding at the places to which people were fleeing, highlighting that in Syria 13 years of conflict had destroyed infrastructure and left a large part of the population in need of humanitarian assistance.

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