Southern Gaza hospitals at ‘breaking point’ – Red Cross

EDITORS NOTE: Graphic content / A Palestinian woman mourns a family member killed in Israeli bombardment, at al-Maamadani Hospital in Gaza City on July 17, 2024. Israel kept up its air strikes on Gaza on July 17 after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to ramp up the pressure on Hamas as hopes fade for a US-announced ceasefire plan. Agence France-Presse

GENEVA — All health facilities in southern Gaza have been pushed to “breaking point” due to an influx of people wounded by Israeli bombardments and doctors could soon be forced to make “difficult choices” on who gets treated, the Red Cross said Thursday.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said its 60-bed field hospital in the city of Rafah took in 26 people requiring hospitalization for shrapnel and other injuries after a strike on the Al-Mawasi camp for displaced people on Saturday.

The health ministry in the Hamas-run territory said at least 90 people were killed and 300 injured in the strike that Israel said targeted military commanders behind the October 7 attack that sparked the Gaza war.

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“The repeated mass casualty events resulting from the unrelenting hostilities have stretched to breaking point the response capacity of our hospital — and all health facilities in southern Gaza — to care for those with life-threatening injuries,” William Schomburg, Gaza head of the ICRC delegation, said in a statement.

“Another mass casualty event would force our doctors and nurses to make extremely difficult choices,” he said, citing limited supplies for treatment and repeated hospital closings during the conflict.

Last week also saw an influx of 850 people requiring outpatient care at the Red Cross hospital, “nearly half of whom are women and a third are children”, the Red Cross said.

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“Most of the patients have been displaced from their homes multiple times and are living with little food and clean water, in overcrowded areas, making it easier for them to fall sick,” the statement said.

Since May it said the hospital had carried out more than 500 surgeries and 12,000 consultations.

The war broke out after Hamas’s unprecedented October 7 attack on Israel that resulted in the deaths of 1,195 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli figures.

Israel’s retaliatory offensive has devastated the narrow coastal territory and killed at least 38,794 people, also mostly civilians, according to figures from Gaza’s health ministry.