Displaced Palestinians, who fled their houses due to Israeli strike, shelter in a camp in Rafah, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, in the southern Gaza Strip, December 6, 2023.
Reuters Photo
Gaza health officials said Wednesday that dozens of bodies had arrived at a major hospital in the central Gaza Strip, and aid agencies warned of critical shortages at that medical facility amid "unrelenting" strikes in the enclave by Israeli forces.
The Gaza Health Ministry said that 73 bodies and 123 injured people had been brought to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, in the city of Deir al-Balah, in the past 24 hours. The circumstances of the deaths and injuries were not immediately known, and the Health Ministry did not elaborate. But aid workers have described intense bombardment by Israeli forces, which say they are advancing on the major southern city of Khan Younis to root out Hamas militants there.
Israeli forces have restricted movement along Gaza's two main roads and have effectively cut off central Gaza from both the north and south of the territory, according to the United Nations' humanitarian office.
Because of the road closures, "fuel and medical supplies have reached critically low levels at Al-Aqsa hospital," aid agency Doctors Without Borders said Wednesday in a social media post.
"The siege must be lifted; medical humanitarian supplies and aid must urgently be supplied to the Gaza Strip in its entirety," the group's post said.
The agency, which supports operations at the hospital, said that hundreds of patients needed emergency medical care and that there were dire shortages of medicines, surgical tools and equipment to repair broken bones.
"There are 700 patients admitted in the hospital now, with new patients arriving all the time," the group's emergency coordinator in Gaza, Marie-Aure Perreaut Revial, said in a statement. "We are running out of essential supplies to treat them."
A Palestinian journalist who has been staying at the hospital for weeks, Mohammed Abu Namous, said that bodies were brought there every day -- so many that hospital workers were stacking them atop one another in ice cream containers.
Israeli bombardment in the area "didn't stop since the beginning of the aggression, but its pace has intensified in the last few days," he said.
Israel, which along with Egypt has enforced a 16-year blockade of Gaza, has allowed few humanitarian supplies to enter the territory since war broke out following the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas, which controls much of the enclave. Since a weeklong truce with Hamas expired last week, Israel has slowed the entry of aid trucks via Egypt.
For the past three days, the only aid being distributed in Gaza has been in the southernmost area of Rafah, on the Egyptian border, because of intense fighting and road closures in other parts of the strip, the U.N. humanitarian office said Wednesday.