Gaza hospitals were running dangerously low on fuel on Sunday, jeopardizing the lives of thousands of sick and injured patients as an expected ground offensive by Israeli forces looms.
The United Nations’ humanitarian office, OCHA, said that its monitors expected fuel supplies could be totally depleted by Monday. The hospitals will be unable to operate without fuel to power their generators. Other basic supplies, like food, water, and medicine, are also dwindling.
“Gaza is running dry,” Juliette Touma, a spokesperson for the U.N.’s Palestinian refugee agency, told the Associated Press.
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Israel has placed Gaza, home to 2.3 million Palestinians, under siege after a series of deadly incursions by Hamas militants last weekend. Ahead of a widely expected full-scale invasion—troops are currently amassing along the country’s border—Israel advised more than a million people in the northern part of the Gaza Strip to immediately evacuate south. Around half a million Palestinians had fled for the south as of Sunday, an Israel Defense Forces spokesperson told CNN, with many of them having taken refuge in UN shelters, which are straining to accommodate the influx.
The Israeli government said on Saturday night that it would cut off Gaza’s electricity, fuel, and access to food. President Benjamin Netanyahu said that the blockade and offensive would continue “without reservation and without respite.”
Around 22 hospitals caring for 2,000 patients were able to evacuate their “mobile patients” to relative safety, a Gaza doctor told the AP. But many patients, including those seriously injured or on ventilators, can’t be moved, and hundreds of new patients are arriving every day.
The World Health Organization said in a statement on Saturday that forcing patients and health workers to relocate “to southern Gaza, where health facilities are already running at maximum capacity and unable to absorb a dramatic rise in the number of patients, could be tantamount to a death sentence.”
“Hospital directors and health workers are now facing an agonizing choice: abandon critically ill patients amid a bombing campaign, put their own lives at risk while remaining on site to treat patients, or endanger their patients’ lives while attempting to transport them to facilities that have no capacity to receive them,” WHO said.
Reuters quoted Hussam Abu Safiya, a doctor at Gaza’s Kamal Edwan Hospital, as saying, “If you want to kill us, kill us while we continue working here, we will not leave. We need days and weeks to secure another place.”
“The situation is really dangerous,” he continued. Some of the hospital’s younger patients are attached to ventilators, he said, and “transferring these children from this place means handing them a death sentence.”
Dr. Muhammad Abu Salima, the director of Gaza’s largest medical complex, told The New York Times on Sunday, “It’s absolutely impossible to evacuate the hospital. There is nowhere in Gaza that can accept the number of patients in our intensive care unit or neonatal intensive care unit or even the operating rooms.”
The Hamas attacks on Oct. 7 resulted in the deaths of 1,400 Israelis, most of them civilians. More than 150 others are believed to have been taken hostage. Roughly 2,670 Palestinians have been killed since the conflict erupted, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, and nearly 10,000 more wounded.
