The UNFPA’s representative for the State of Palestine reported that recent UN-led trips to ten Gaza hospitals discovered several “in ruins” and only a handful capable of delivering any kind of prenatal care.
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A Palestinian woman mourns the death of a loved one at the Al-Najjar Hospital following an Israeli bombardment in Rafah. (AFP)
The Ministry of Health in Gaza announced in its daily report today that the Israeli occupation committed four massacres against families in the Gaza Strip, killing 42 and injuring 63 in 24 hours only.
This brings the total number of Palestinians killed in Gaza due to the Israeli genocide since October 7 to 34,012, in addition to 76,833 injuries, according to the Ministry.
It also stressed that thousands of victims are still under the rubble and on the streets, as the IOF deliberately prevents ambulances and civil defense crews from reaching them.
Complex medical equipment ‘purposefully broken’ in Gaza hospitals: UN
The United Nations condemned on Friday the deliberate destruction of complicated and difficult-to-obtain medical equipment in Gaza’s battered hospitals and maternity units, exacerbating dangers to women already giving birth in “inhumane, unimaginable conditions.”
Dominic Allen, the UN Population Fund’s (UNFPA) representative for the State of Palestine, reported that recent UN-led trips to ten Gaza hospitals discovered several “in ruins” and only a handful capable of delivering any kind of prenatal care.
It is worth noting, as per the Palestinian Bureau of Statistics, that almost half the population in the Strip is under 18 and the fertility rate is high at 3.38 births per woman.
He expressed that what investigators saw inside the Nasser medical complex, which was besieged in Khan Younis, “breaks my heart,” citing “medical equipment purposefully broken,” ultrasounds with cables cut, and smashed screens of medical equipment.
Even before the current war on Gaza began, the World Health Organization had emphasized the difficulty of sending such equipment into Gaza due to the Israeli siege.
Allen cautioned that such “purposeful, wanton destruction in the maternity ward,” when paired with other damage and lack of water, sanitation, and power, was making it even harder to revive the second-most crucial medical complex in Gaza “to provide a lifeline.”
‘An eerie sense of death’
At Al-Khair, another specialty maternity facility in Khan Younis, Allen reported an “eerie sense of death,” adding that “it didn’t seem as if there was any piece of working medical equipment.”
Just ten of Gaza’s 36 hospitals are even partially operational and only 3 of them were capable of assisting the 180 women giving birth every day in the Strip, with around 15% of them suffering difficulties needing extensive treatment.
Hospitals that can provide such treatment are therefore experiencing substantial capacity limitations.
The medical facility in the south, which is now Gaza’s major maternity facility, is sustaining up to 60 deliveries every day, including up to 12 Caesarean sections, he added.
Given the facility’s high demand, women are released within hours after giving birth, “and after C-sections, it is less than a day,” Allen added, emphasizing this comes with increased risks.
One doctor at the Emirati hospital told Allen that he no longer sees normal-size babies,” citing increased complications and procedures directly correlated to “malnutrition, dehydration, and fear,” which affect the ability to give birth and carry a baby to term.
The UNFPA is “deeply concerned about the ability to provide postnatal care” in Gaza, which has a “completely crippled” health system, Allen continued.
‘Israel’ after every form of life in Gaza, destroys 4,000 IVF embryos
After “Israel” struck Gaza’s largest fertility and IVF clinic, Al Basma Center, five liquid nitrogen tanks in the embryology unit had their lids blasted off, destroying more than 4000 embryos and 1000 specimens of sperm and unfertilized eggs, Reuters reported.
Bahaeldeen Ghalayini, the Cambridge-trained obstetrician and gynecologist who established the clinic in 1997, expressed, “We know deeply what these 5,000 lives, or potential lives, meant for the parents, either for the future or for the past.”
He noted that at least half of those couples who can no longer produce sperm or eggs will not have another opportunity to have a baby.
“My heart is divided into a million pieces.”
According to Ghalayini, those who underwent IVF were selling TVs and their jewelry to pay the fees.
Gaza City facing environmental disaster
In a related context, the head of the Government Media Office in Gaza, Salama Marouf, warned on Friday that Gaza City is facing an environmental catastrophe as a result of the water wells going out of service two weeks ago.
Marouf said, in a statement, that Gaza City is facing “a new environmental disaster threatening the population because the water wells are no longer functional for two weeks,” stressing that the entire Gaza Strip is now experiencing extreme thirst due to water outages, especially with the continued cessation of water pumping from the “Mekorot” line since the beginning of the aggression.
Salama added that the disaster resulted from the depletion of the “scarce” amounts of fuel that were made available to the Gaza municipality recently.
Moreover, the aggression completely destroyed the only desalination plant in the city, more than 40 water wells, and 120,000 linear meters of water networks in the city.
He pointed out that the crisis has now reached its peak as temperatures are rising and demand and consumption are increasing, which calls for urgent intervention from the concerned authorities.
The Media Office chief called on all concerned parties to urgently provide fuel and water to the people to save them from a state of “extreme thirst and a health and environmental crisis that will be exacerbated by water outages.”
