(Geneva) The UN denounced Friday the intentional destruction of sophisticated and difficult to obtain medical equipment in besieged hospitals and maternity wards in Gaza, worsening the risks for women who already give birth in “inhumane and unimaginable conditions”.
Recent UN missions to 10 hospitals in Gaza found many of them “in ruins”, with only a few able to provide maternal and child health services, Dominic said Allen, representative of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) of Palestine.
What the teams saw in the Nasser hospital complex, long besieged by Israeli forces during their operations in the southern town of Khan Yunis, “breaks my heart,” he said.
Speaking to journalists in Geneva via video link from Jerusalem, he described seeing “medical equipment intentionally broken, ultrasound machines — which, you know, are a very important tool to ensure safe deliveries — with cables cut.” .
“Screens of sophisticated medical equipment, such as ultrasound machines and other equipment, were broken,” he added.
The World Health Organization had described the difficulty of introducing such equipment into Gaza even before the current war broke out following the Hamas attack in Israel on October 7.
In addition, at al-Khair, another maternity ward in Khan Younes, “there did not seem to be any medical equipment in working order,” he said, lamenting that the delivery rooms “remain silent.” .
[Les salles d’accouchement] should be a place where life is given and they just give a strange feeling of death.
Dominic Allen, UNFPA representative
10 functional hospitals out of 36
Only 10 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals are currently functioning, even partially.
And according to Mr. Allen, only three of them are now able to provide assistance to the approximately 180 women who give birth every day across Gaza – around 15% of whom suffer complications requiring extensive care.
Hospitals capable of providing such care therefore face significant constraints.
The Emirati field hospital in the south, which is currently Gaza’s main maternity ward, for example, handles up to 60 deliveries each day, with up to 12 cesarean sections, he said.
PHOTO FATIMA SHBAIR, ASSOCIATED PRESS
A nurse takes care of babies in the premature ward of the UAE hospital in Rafah on March 8.
Given the high pressure on the facility, women are discharged just hours after giving birth and “and less than a day after a cesarean,” Mr. Allen said, emphasizing that “this increases the risks.”
The current war began after Hamas launched an unprecedented attack on October 7 that resulted in the deaths of 1,170 people in southern Israel, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on figures Israeli officials.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 33,970 people in Gaza, most of them women and children, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.