Aid workers are sounding the alarm this week on the worsening humanitarian crisis in northern Gaza, where Israeli forces have trapped Palestinians while intensifying attacks both on civilians and life-sustaining infrastructure.
The Israeli military has been killing scores of people in a nearly weeklong siege across northern Gaza, with a particular focus on the Jabalia refugee camp. In addition to the airstrikes and shelling, Israeli forces are also applying the lethal strategy of destroying northern Gaza’s health system while blocking access to humanitarian aid ― a deadly strategy by the military that has been extensively reported on by HuffPost.
“The situation in Gaza is beyond horrific. It is not safe, neither for civilians nor for the humanitarians and aid workers,” Nebal Farsakh, a spokesperson for the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS), said overnight on Wednesday to Indian network WIONews. “We need the international community to take serious measures.”
There are still at least 400,000 Palestinians in northern Gaza, which the Israeli military has isolated from the rest of the territory as it pummels the region. The PRCS released a video on Thursday showing staff instructing a woman over the phone on how to administer first aid, since medics could not enter a closed military zone. Israeli forces attacked the woman’s home in Jabalia, killing two and injuring 11, including five children, the humanitarian organisation said.
The Israeli military also forced Indonesian, Kamal Adwan and Al-Awda hospitals to evacuate despite the hundreds of patients in their care, around 80 of whom were unable to move in intensive care, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. The hospitals are some of the few remaining facilities open in Gaza and simultaneously serve as shelters for many displaced Palestinians, including medical staff.
“I tried to explain to the army that this hospital provides vital humanitarian services for children,” Kamal Adwan’s director, Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, said in a statement on Wednesday. “These are the only services available in Gaza and the northern part of the Strip, such as neonatal and intensive care. There are seven children on ventilators, and moving or transferring them would be extremely difficult.”
Health care workers were able to evacuate newborns from Kamal Adwan Hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit to Patient Friends Hospital in Gaza City, though Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP) said ambulances are being detained at military checkpoints. Dr John Kahler, founder of MedGlobal, told HuffPost that there were still about 50 to 60 patients remaining at Kamal Adwan.
“Evacuating now is extremely difficult because we are under siege, and leaving the hospital could result in arrest,” Safiya said. “What happened in the other hospitals could very well happen to us. Many have been assassinated, executed, arrested or beaten, and some have even died during interrogations.”
Despite Kamal Adwan Hospital being forced to shut down most services in response to the siege, the emergency department is still able to receive and treat some patients. But on Thursday, the Gaza Media Office said that the Israeli military had blocked fuel supplies for the fifth consecutive time, meaning that all hospitals and Health Ministry facilities are now at risk of shutting down within 24 hours.
The Israeli military said it would respond to HuffPost at a later time with a comment.
Palestinian nutritionist Rana Soboh told HuffPost on Thursday morning that she and her family were alive but trapped in the North Gaza Governorate, which the Israeli forces have separated from Gaza City. Before this week’s siege, Soboh was overseeing a nutrition stabilisation site to help starving Palestinians at Kamal Adwan Hospital. Now with people too afraid to even be seen on the street, the initiative is essentially defunct.
The United Nations’ World Food Program said that as of this month, its teams can no longer “distribute food in any form” to North Gaza because of a lack of supplies ― worsening the region’s already dire level of starvation. The aid group Mercy Corps said crews were ready to transport 4,000 hygiene kits and 1,600 food kits into Gaza from Jordan but could not bring them into the territory’s northern region because the previously passable entry points were blocked.
“The people of northern Gaza are already enduring extreme hunger and malnutrition, with many surviving on just one meal a day. The only food widely available is canned goods, but these come at an exorbitant cost, and other essentials are even scarcer and more expensive,” Mercy Corps’ Gaza director, Rachel Norris, said on Wednesday.
“The latest offensive will only worsen these dire conditions, leaving families with fewer options and no safe place to seek refuge,” she said. “Our teams are doing everything possible, but without safe, consistent humanitarian access, this crisis will only worsen.”
On Wednesday, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said that Israeli authorities approved a mission to northern Gaza in which humanitarians would help evacuate critically injured patients to another hospital. After the mission’s seven ambulances and several humanitarian workers waited five hours at a checkpoint to go north, the OCHA staff had to return to their bases in the south.
“The Israeli military’s actions in northern Gaza are systematically collapsing the little of what remains of the health system and eliminating the conditions needed to maintain Palestinian survival,” Rohan Talbot, MAP’s director of advocacy, said in a statement Wednesday. “Even if people are forced to flee, there is nowhere safe in Gaza for people to go.”
Israel had told Palestinians in the north to move to the so-called humanitarian zone between Mawasi and Deir al-Balah, where Doctors Without Borders says a million people are already living in inhumane conditions with little to no life-sustaining infrastructure. An estimated 70,000 people have left so far, according to the UN.
The dangers of the so-called humanitarian zone were made clear on Thursday when an Israeli airstrike on a school in Deir al-Balah killed at least 28 people, including two health care workers who were partnering with UNICEF. Many of the casualties were mothers and children waiting in line at a malnutrition treatment point, according to Adele Khodr, the agency’s regional director for the Middle East and North Africa.
“This attack serves as yet another stark reminder of the immense toll being inflicted on children and mothers in Gaza,” she posted on social media. “They are not targets; they must be protected at all times.”
