A World Health Organization (WHO) official responsible for coordinating its teams in the Gaza Strip said on Wednesday that he had seen patients “just waiting to die” in hospitals in the enclave, whose operations are facing unimaginable problems due to the war, speaking yesterday Wednesday to the press at UN headquarters in New York.

After five weeks in the Palestinian enclave, Sean Casey, WHO coordinator, said he was seeing patients in hospitals every day with “very severe burns”, with “open fractures”, waiting “hours and days” for care.

“They often asked me for food or water,” which “shows the level of desperation,” he continued.

Mr. Casey pointed out that he was able to visit only six of the 16 hospitals in the Gaza Strip where activity continues. Before the war broke out, there were 36 operating in the enclave.

“What I saw personally is the rapid deterioration of the health system,” he summarized, at the same time as “the reduction in access to humanitarian aid, particularly in the northern areas of the (Gaza) Strip.”

“We tried every day, for seven days, to deliver fuel and supplies north of Gaza City. Every day, our requests were rejected,” he recounted.

In the hospitals of the Gaza Strip, the arrival of wounded is unstoppable, while the medical and nursing staff have been reduced to a minimum, as their members, like the vast majority of the population, have been displaced from their homes.

Mr Casey said he saw patients in the northern Gaza Strip simply “waiting to die in a hospital with no fuel, no electricity, no water”.

The war that caused widespread destruction in the small Palestinian enclave and displaced more than 80% of the population was triggered by an unprecedented attack by the military arm of Hamas against southern sectors of Israel on October 7, when some 1,140 people, mostly civilians, were killed. according to an AFP report based on official announcements by the authorities.

Israel’s civil-military leadership has vowed to “wipe out” the Palestinian Islamist movement in power in the enclave since 2007, and retaliatory military operations since then have killed at least 24,448 people, the vast majority of them women and children, according to the latest health ministry tally. of Hamas. The UN warns that the risk of “famine” and “deadly epidemics” is now increasing in the Gaza Strip.