A representative of the World Health Organization on Wednesday detailed the appalling conditions in the last hospitals in the Gaza Strip, where patients are essentially “waiting to die” as a result of severe staff and supply shortages.
During his five weeks in the war-torn Palestinian area, Sean Casey, the coordinator of the emergency medical team, reported seeing hospital patients “every day with severe burns, with open fractures waiting hours or days” for care.
“They would often ask me for food or water — that demonstrates the level of desperation that we see,” Casey told reporters at UN headquarters in New York.
He said he was only able to visit six of Gaza’s 16 functioning hospitals, out of 36 that existed before the war broke out.
“What I’ve seen personally is a rapid deterioration of the health system alongside a rapidly increasing level of humanitarian aid and diminishing level of humanitarian access particularly to areas in the north of the Strip.”
He described seeing patients in the north who were “basically waiting to die in a hospital that has no fuel, no power, no water.”
“We tried every single day for seven days to deliver fuel and supplies to the north to Gaza City,” Casey said. “Every day, those requests for coordinated movements were denied.”
The hospitals are facing a deluge of patients while operating with minimal staff, many of whom — like the vast majority of Gaza’s population — have been displaced from their homes, Casey said.
“Hospital directors were telling me how their surgeons, plastic surgeon, for example, could not do surgery, because he was out collecting sticks to burn his firewood to cook for his family.”
Fighting has ravaged Gaza since Hamas’s unprecedented October 7 attacks on Israel that resulted in the death of about 1,140 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
The latest numbers from the Gaza Health Ministry show that at least 24,448 Palestinians have died as a result of Israeli bombardments and ground assaults; over 70% of these victims were women, small children, and teenagers.
Approximately 250 hostages were taken by Hamas and other terrorists during the October 7 attacks; of them, about 132 are still in Gaza, with at least 27 of them reportedly dead.
Echoing similar calls by WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Casey said the most critical need in Gaza “is really a ceasefire.”
“Everything short of that is simply addressing needs on a day by day basis.”
In the south, Casey said he visited the Nasser medical complex, where “they had only 30 percent of their staff remaining and about 200 percent of their bed capacity — so patients everywhere in the corridors on the floor.”
“I went to the burn unit where there was one physician caring for 100 patients,” he said.
The “humanitarian catastrophe that’s unfolding every day is getting worse and worse” Casey said, in addition to “the collapse of the health system day by day.”
