Introduction by Croakey: One month on from the start of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, international agencies are ramping up their calls for an immediate ceasefire to allow the passage of desperately needed health supplies and put an end to the shocking toll on civilians, including thousands of children.
With the situation in Gaza hospitals becoming increasingly dire, agencies are also calling for the protection of healthcare workers, amid news that a Red Cross humanitarian convoy in Gaza City came under fire while carrying lifesaving medical supplies to health facilities.
Jason Staines and Marie McInerney write:
About 160 children are being killed every day in Gaza, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), as the bombardment reaches the one-month mark and the loss of an estimated 4,300 children to date.
“Every day, you think it is the worst day and then the next day is worse,” WHO spokesperson Christian Lindmeier said, quoting a colleague in Gaza, which remains under almost complete blockade as the death toll mounts. The level of death and suffering is “hard to fathom”, he said.
Lindmeier said what is needed now is “the political will to at least grant a humanitarian pause and access to alleviate the suffering of the civilian population as well as the hostages in Gaza”.
Everything was set up to get aid moving into the region, he said, with logistics, convoys and supplies ready. However, “what is not there is the access”.
“We need unhindered safe and secure access all the way to the patients and to the hospitals. Getting across into Gaza is one thing, getting further to the hospitals and the supplies stations is the next step,” Lindmeier said.
On a visit overnight (Australian time) to the region, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk, described the border crossing into Gaza as “the gates to a living nightmare” where Palestinian civilians “have been suffocating, under persistent bombardment, mourning their families, struggling for water, for food, for electricity and fuel”.
Health workers under threat
While healthcare systems were under extreme stress — with doctors often operating without anaesthetic — Lindmeier said healthcare workers were also being killed in the bombardment.
Among those killed this week was a lab technician working for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). In a statement, MSF Australia and New Zealand said Mohammed Al Ahel was at his home in Al Shate Refugee Camp when the area was bombed, and his building collapsed. The group reiterated its call for an “immediate and unconditional ceasefire”.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said it was “deeply troubled” that its humanitarian convoy in Gaza City came under fire on Tuesday, reminding the parties of their obligation under international humanitarian law to respect and protect humanitarian workers.
It said the convoy was carrying lifesaving medical supplies to health facilities, including to Al Quds hospital of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, when it was hit. Two trucks were damaged, and a driver was lightly wounded.
“These are not the conditions under which humanitarian personnel can work,” said William Schomburg, the head of the ICRC delegation in Gaza. “We are here to bring urgent assistance to civilians in need. Ensuring that vital assistance can reach medical facilities is a legal obligation under international humanitarian law.”
The Gaza Strip has been under heavy bombardment since the Palestinian group Hamas launched a surprise offensive against Israel on 7 October, killing 1,400 people and taking more than 240 hostage. In the Israeli bombardment since, at least 10,328 Palestinians, including 4,237 children and 2,719 women, have been killed.
The campaign #NotATarget said that the situation for healthcare works in Gaza was becoming increasingly deadly. On 31 October, the campaign published a letter in The Lancet calling on “politicians and policymakers to protect civilians from harmful military action, particularly frontline workers such as journalists and healthcare workers.”
Since then, according to Osaid Alser, a medical doctor and Palestinian refugee, the statistics have worsened, with approximately 130 healthcare workers killed, “57 facilities targeted resulting in 12 hospitals and 32 facilities being non-operational”.
Calling also for the immediate release of Israeli hostages, leading UN officials and staff, including WHO Secretary-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, have pleaded with Member States to act, saying “an entire population is besieged and under attack, denied access to the essentials for survival, bombed in their homes, shelters, hospitals and places of worship. This is unacceptable.”
Their statement, issued last Sunday, said more than 100 attacks against health care had been reported, with scores of aid workers killed since October 7 including 88 UNRWA colleagues – “the highest number of United Nations fatalities ever recorded in a single conflict”.
That number of UNRWA casualties has now risen to 99, while Reporters without Borders said 36 journalists had been killed in Gaza by Israeli strikes to date.
Graveyard for children
The toll on children continues to mount, with UN Secretary-General António Guterres saying Gaza was becoming a “graveyard for children”, with hundreds killed or injured daily.
As well as the immediate need to treat the injured, the UN has highlighted another developing emergency — some 50,000 pregnant women are residents of Gaza, with 5,500 due to give birth in the coming weeks.
The UN Population Fund (UNPF) said doctors in overstretched hospitals were working to deliver babies with little to no supplies.
The UNPF’s Regional Director for the Arab States, Laila Baker, said more than 135 health facilities had been targeted in the bombardment of Gaza over the past month.
“The remaining health facilities that stay standing have very little medication, no fuel to run electricity. We’ve had caesarean sections for emergency deliveries that have been done with little or no anaesthesia and on occasion only with the light from a mobile phone,” she said.
The latest UN update said that, on Tuesday, the Israeli army renewed its evacuation orders for the Rantisi hospital in Gaza City, the only paediatric facility in the north, claiming that armed groups were using its premises and surroundings.
According to Gaza’s health authorities, such an evacuation would endanger the lives of dozens of children who are either on life support, undergoing kidney dialysis or relying on respirators.
The update reported that no bakeries are functioning in northern Gaza because of a lack of fuel, water and flour and no food or bottled water has been distributed there in a week. See this video.
WHO reported today that intense overcrowding and disrupted health, water, and sanitation systems pose an added danger: the rapid spread of infectious diseases, with worrying trends already emerging.
“Lack of fuel has led to the shutting down of desalination plants, significantly increasing the risk of bacterial infections like diarrhea spreading as people consume contaminated water. Lack of fuel has also disrupted all solid waste collection, creating an environment conducive to the rapid and widespread proliferation of insects, rodents that can carry and transit diseases,” it said.
WHO warned that disrupted routine vaccination activities, as well as lack of medicines for treating communicable diseases, further increase the risk of accelerated disease spread. Damaged water and sanitation systems, and dwindling cleaning supplies have made it almost impossible to maintain basic infection prevention and control measures in health facilities.
Baker said a ceasefire was necessary to allow medical groups into Gaza “with the goods, unhindered and unconditionally, to be able to provide for those who have been forcibly displaced to the south, for those who are injured and overwhelming the hospital facilities, and to bring in the goods and people where we can start to at least address some of those critical humanitarian needs”.
Unbearable losses
Australian palliative care researcher, practitioner and advocate Rachel Coghlan and her Scottish colleague Dr Mhoira Leng had been scheduled to be in Gaza this week to support palliative care education and mentoring of undergraduate medical students and postgraduate healthcare professionals.
In a powerful Op Ed at Guardian Australia, they reported the devastating experiences of colleagues and others, whose stories “constitute the very worst human suffering and most nauseating deaths”.
As well as the toll of bombardments, they write how cancer patients await death, “from their disease but also possibly from bombs, as the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship hospital, exhausted of fuel and all medical supplies including pain relief and subject to direct shelling this week, now ceases to offer either treatment or refuge”.
One colleague messaged them about the loss of multiple members of her family in one bombing, including a friend and relative who died with her sons aged 10, 8, 6 and 10 hours.
“Yes, she delivered her baby and they died together 10 hours later,” she reported. “He will never have a birth certificate, only one for his death.”
Previously at Croakey
- “This cannot go on” – a cry for an end to intolerable suffering
- Medical organisation publishes open letter expressing “extreme concern” at Australia’s failure to support ceasefire in Gaza
- Health sector urged to speak out for ceasefire in Gaza
- Calls for ceasefire amid catastrophe in Gaza – “every child everywhere deserves peace”
