Water has run out at UN shelters across Gaza as thousands of people packed into the courtyard of the besieged territory’s largest hospital as a refuge of last resort from a looming Israeli ground offensive.
Palestinian civilians across Gaza, already battered by years of conflict, were struggling for survival on Sunday in the face of an unprecedented Israeli operation against the territory following a Hamas militant attack on October 7 that killed 1,300 Israelis, most of them civilians.
Israel has cut off the flow of food, medicine, water and electricity to Gaza, pounded neighbourhoods with airstrikes and told the estimated one million residents of the north to flee south ahead of Israel’s planned attack. The Gaza health ministry said more than 2,300 Palestinians had been killed since the fighting erupted last weekend.
Relief groups called for the protection of the over two million civilians in Gaza urging an emergency corridor be established for the transfer of humanitarian aid.
Meanwhile, overwhelmed doctors were struggling to care for patients they feared would die once generators ran out of fuel.
“The difference with this escalation is we don’t have medical aid coming in from outside, the border is closed, electricity is off and this constitutes a high danger for our patients,” Dr Mohammed Qandeel, who works at Nasser Hospital in the southern Khan Younis area, said.
Doctors in the evacuation zone said they could not relocate their patients safely, so they had decided to stay as well to care for them.
“We shall not evacuate the hospital even if it costs us our lives,” Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, head of paediatrics at Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia, said.
If they left, the seven newborns in the intensive care unit would die, he said. And even if they could move them, there was nowhere for them to go in the 25-mile-long (40km) coastal territory.
“Hospitals are full,” Dr Abu Safiya said.
The wounded continued to stream in every day with severed limbs and life-threatening injuries, he said.
Other doctors feared for the lives of patients dependent on ventilators and those suffering from complex blast wounds needing round-the-clock care.
Doctors worried that entire hospital facilities would be shut down and many would die as the last of fuel stocks powering their generators came close to running out.
United Nations humanitarian monitors estimated this could happen by Monday.
At Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, the heart of the evacuation zone, medical officials estimated at least 35,000 men, women and children were crammed into the large open grounds, in the lobby and in the hallways, hoping the location would give them protection from the fighting.
“Their situation is very difficult,” hospital director Mohammed Abu Selmia said.
Despite the order to evacuate more than 1 MILLION to southern📍#Gaza, many people – pregnant women, children, older persons and persons with disabilities – will not be able to flee the area.
🛑 They have no choice and must be protected at all times.https://t.co/61x9k6vP0B pic.twitter.com/Ayso9OhMiV
— UNRWA (@UNRWA) October 15, 2023
Hundreds of wounded continue to come to the hospital every day, he added.
About half-a-million Gaza residents had taken refuge in UN shelters across the territory and were running out of water, Juliette Touma, a spokesperson for the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency (UNRWA) said.
“Gaza is running dry,” she said, adding that UN teams had also begun to ration water.
Touma said a quarter-of-a-million people in Gaza had moved to shelters over the past 24 hours, the majority of which were UN schools where “clean water has actually run out”, Inas Hamdan, another UNRWA spokeswoman, said.
Across Gaza, families rationed dwindling water supplies, with many forced to drink dirty or brackish water.
“I am very happy that I was able to brush my teeth today, can you imagine what lengths we have reached?” Shaima al-Farra, in Khan Younis, said.