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Gaza’s health system “is on its knees and collapsing,” the head of the World Health Organization said on Sunday, as Israel pressed ahead with its military offensive in the Palestinian enclave.
With more than 46,000 injuries, over 17,000 reported deaths and 1.9 million people displaced, the ongoing Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip has led to “signals of epidemic diseases including bloody diarrhea and jaundice,” WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told WHO member countries on Sunday. The WHO is also getting reports of high levels of diarrhea-like diseases and respiratory infections. The situation is only expected to worsen as fighting continues, he said.
Half of Gaza’s population is also starving, the Deputy Director of the U.N. World Food Program Carl Skau, according to the BBC.
Despite the war, patients continue to need routine health care, with over 180 women giving birth every day and 2,000 patients on cancer therapy. But with just 14 hospitals out of an original 36 even partially functional, Tedros said that the work of health workers “is impossible.”
Under international law, health care facilities are meant to be protected during conflict, but the WHO has verified over 449 attacks on health care in Gaza and the West Bank.
On Sunday, Israeli tanks entered the center of Khan Younis, which Reuters described as a major new push into the heart of the main city in the southern part of the Gaza Strip.
Tedros was speaking as countries discussed a resolution on the situation in Gaza, that would see the WHO report on the public health implications of the crisis; strengthen their work with partners; and boost technical and material assistance. However, Tedros said that these tasks are “almost impossible in the current circumstances” and reiterated his calls for a humanitarian cease-fire.
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