“Hospitals cannot be battlefields, and we are very concerned about the safety of medical staff and patients,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who met with Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen and Health Minister Uriel Menachem Buso in Geneva on Tuesday.
The Ethiopian expert said that the WHO has lost contact with staff at the main hospital in Gaza, lamenting that it has not received updated information on the dead and injured in Gaza for three days, “which hinders the ability to assess the functioning of the health system”.
“What we do know is that only a quarter of the hospitals in Gaza are still functioning and 26 out of 36 are closed due to damage caused by attacks or running out of fuel,” the WHO chief lamented in his weekly press release. Conference.
“Before the conflict, Gaza had about 3,500 hospital beds, now it is estimated that there are only 1,400, and the large number of patients, doctors and nurses have to make impossible decisions about who lives and who does not,” Tedros said.
The WHO director-general stressed the need for fuel inside Gaza to provide hospitals and other basic services, on a day when Israel for the first time authorized 23,000 liters of fuel to enter Gaza only for trucks carrying humanitarian aid. Help.
“At least 120,000 liters of fuel are needed per day to power hospital generators, ambulances, desalination plants, waste treatment plants and telecommunications,” warned Tedros.
The Israeli military announced Tuesday night a “targeted and precise operation against Hamas in a specific section of Al-Shifa hospital,” the largest in the Gaza Strip.
The hospital, which has been without electricity, drinking water and food for days, houses about 9,000 people, including displaced people, medical staff and patients, including more than 30 premature babies.
France today expressed its “deep concern over the military operations at al-Shifa hospital”, noting that the Palestinian people “must not pay for the crimes of Hamas”.
The country also recalls that “Israel must respect international humanitarian law, which imposes clear principles of distinction, necessity, proportionality and precaution, at all times and in all places, in particular for the protection of hospital infrastructures.” .
Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi condemned the Security Council’s “silence” over the Israeli move.
“This silence covers up war crimes, so it cannot be accepted or justified. The Council must act,” Safadi said on social network X.
Norway also expressed concern over the measures, saying they “go too far and are unacceptable”.
“This is already worsening the humanitarian situation in Gaza,” said Norway’s head of diplomacy, Espen Barth Eide.
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