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As Israel called on Gazans to leave the besieged enclave’s north, hospitals in Gaza City said they had no way to evacuate thousands of sick and injured patients and that there were not enough hospitals to treat them in the south.
As a widely anticipated ground invasion loomed, the city’s hospitals continued to receive hundreds of injured victims from the Israeli airstrikes that hit the Palestinian territory over the past week.
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have fled south, but nowhere is safe in the entire Gaza Strip and a rapidly growing humanitarian crisis has erupted as a result of Israel’s blockade of food, water and fuel from entering the territory.
Nearly half of Gaza’s population of more than two million people has been displaced in the past week, according to UNRWA, the UN agency that helps the Palestinians.
At Al Shifa Hospital, the largest medical complex in the Gaza Strip, the wounded continued to arrive on Sunday. Moving them to another location was logistically impossible, their director said.
“It is absolutely impossible to evacuate the hospital,” said its director, Dr. Muhammad Abu Salima. “There is no place in Gaza that can accept the number of patients in our intensive care unit or neonatal intensive care unit or even in the operating rooms.”
At the hospital, 70 patients are on ventilators, 200 are receiving dialysis treatment and many babies are in incubators, he said.
“If someone doesn’t die from the bombing, they will die from lack of medical service,” he said.
Transporting seriously injured patients was also a challenge. There are not enough ambulances either. Since last Saturday, when Israel began its airstrike on Gaza, at least 15 ambulances have been bombed and destroyed in airstrikes, Gaza’s Health Ministry said.
Israel launched its airstrikes on Gaza after Hamas, the group that controls Gaza, staged a surprise attack on southern Israel that killed more than 1,300 people.
On Saturday, the World Health Organization condemned Israel’s calls to evacuate 22 hospitals in northern Gaza, calling it a “death sentence” for the sick and wounded.
The organization said there were around 2,000 desperately ill patients inside hospital wards under evacuation orders, including those in intensive care or on life support, including newborn babies in incubators. As a result of the Israeli attack, Gaza hospitals are operating beyond their maximum capacity, with some patients being treated in hallways and outdoors on surrounding streets, the World Health Organization said.
Iyad Abuheweila contributed with reports.