KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip — Water has run out in UN shelters across Gaza as thousands fill the courtyard of the besieged territory’s largest hospital as a last refuge from a looming Israeli ground offensive and overwhelmed doctors struggle to care for patients they fear shuts down when the generator runs out of fuel.
Palestinian civilians across Gaza, already wracked by years of conflict, struggled to survive Sunday in the face of an unprecedented Israeli operation against the territory following an Oct. 7 attack by Hamas militants that killed 1,300 Israelis, mostly civilians.
Israel has cut off the flow of food, medicine, water and electricity to Gaza, bombarded neighborhoods with airstrikes and told about 1 million residents in the north to flee to the south ahead of a planned Israeli offensive. Gaza’s Health Ministry says more than 2,300 Palestinians have been killed since fighting broke out last weekend.
US national security adviser Jake Sullivan told CNN on Sunday that Israeli officials told him they had turned the water back on in southern Gaza. Israel’s energy and water minister, Israel Katz, said in a statement that water had been restored at “certain points” in Gaza, but gave no further details. Aid workers in Gaza said they had seen no evidence the water had returned and a Gaza government spokesman said it was not flowing.
Aid groups call for the protection of more than 2 million civilians in Gaza calling for an emergency corridor to be established for the transfer of humanitarian aid.
A Palestinian child receives medical treatment at al-Aqsa hospital in the Gaza Strip on Oct. 15 AP
“The difference with this increase is that we don’t have medical help coming from outside, the borders are closed, the electricity is cut off and this is a high danger for our patients,” said Dr. Mohammed Qandeel, who works at Nasser Hospital in the southern area of Khan Younis.
Doctors in the evacuation zone said they could not safely relocate their patients, so they decided to stay as well to take care of them.
“We will not evacuate the hospital even if it costs our lives,” said Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, head of pediatrics at Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia.
If they left, seven newborns in the intensive care unit would die, he said. And even if they could move them, there was nowhere for them to go on the 40-kilometer (25-mile-long) coastal region. “The hospital is full,” said Abu Safiya. A stream of wounded come in every day with severed limbs and life-threatening injuries, he said.
Debris is seen following an Israeli airstrike in Deir el-Balah, Gaza.AP
Other doctors fear for the lives of ventilator-dependent patients and those with complex blast injuries who require round-the-clock care. Doctors fear that entire hospital facilities will be shut down and many will die as the last stock of fuel supplying their generators is running low. United Nations humanitarian monitors estimate this could happen on Monday.
At Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, the center of the evacuation zone, medical officials estimated at least 35,000 men, women and children were crammed into large open spaces, in lobbies and hallways, hoping the location would give them protection from the fighting. . “Their situation is very difficult,” said hospital director Mohammed Abu Selmia.
Hundreds of injured continue to come to the hospital every day, he said.
Palestinian children see a building destroyed in an airstrike.AP
About half a million Gazans have taken refuge in UN shelters across the territory and are running out of water, said Juliette Touma, spokeswoman for the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency, known by its acronym UNRWA. “Gaza is drying up,” he said, adding that the UN team had also started rationing water.
Touma said a quarter of a million people in Gaza had moved into shelters in the past 24 hours, the majority of which were UN schools where “clean water has actually run out,” said Inas Hamdan, another UNRWA spokesman.
Across Gaza, families are rationing dwindling water supplies, with many forced to drink dirty or brackish water.
“I’m so glad I got to brush my teeth today, can you imagine how far we’ve come?” said Shaima al-Farra, in Khan Younis.
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Source: thtrangdai.edu.vn/en/
