IN PICTURES | Gaza’s largest hospital an ’empty shell’ strewn with corpses, says WHO

Gaza’s largest hospital has been reduced to an “empty shell” strewn with human remains by the latest Israeli operation against it, the World Health Organization (WHO) denounced on Saturday.

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Israeli forces withdrew from Gaza City’s al-Chifa hospital on Monday after a two-week operation, during which they said they battled Palestinian fighters inside what was the country’s largest compound. medical in the Palestinian territory.

A WHO-led mission was able to access the hospital on Friday, the UN agency said.

“Al-Chifa, once the backbone of Gaza’s health system, is now an empty shell with graves,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus wrote on X.

In a statement, the WHO said there were no more patients in the hospital, where “numerous shallow graves” were dug outside the emergency department and administrative and surgical buildings.

“In the same area, many corpses were partially buried with their limbs visible,” notes the WHO, whose staff reported “a pungent odor of decomposing bodies.”

The mission, in cooperation with other UN agencies and the hospital’s acting director, found that “the scale of the devastation has rendered the facility completely unusable.”

“Most of the buildings… are largely destroyed and the majority of the equipment damaged or reduced to ashes,” Mr. Tedros said.

The WHO cites the testimony of the interim director of the hospital, according to which the patients were “kept in appalling conditions” during the Israeli operation.

“They suffered from a cruel lack of food, water, health care, hygiene”, moved “from one building to another at gunpoint”. At least 20 patients are believed to have died.

Mr. Tedros lamented that efforts, notably by the WHO, to restore basic services after Israel’s first raid on the hospital last year “are now lost”, depriving the population of “access to vital health care services.

Only 10 out of 36 of Gaza’s main hospitals are still partially functional, according to the WHO.

The war in Gaza was triggered by the attack on October 7 by Hamas in Israel, which resulted in the deaths of 1,170 people, most of them civilians, according to a report established by AFP based on official Israeli figures. .

The operation in Gaza, carried out in retaliation by Israel, killed at least 33,137 people, mainly civilians, according to the Hamas health ministry.