The OHE today denounced the deliberate destruction of hard-to-obtain advanced medical equipment in besieged hospitals and maternity wards in Gaza, exacerbating the risks to women already giving birth in “inhumane and unbelievable conditions”.

Recent missions by the United Nations to 10 hospitals in Gaza revealed that many of them have been reduced to “rubble” and that only some can still provide maternal and newborn health services, said Dominic Allen, spokesman for the United Nations Children’s Fund. Population of Palestine.

What the teams witnessed at the Nasser hospital complex, which has been under siege for a long time by Israeli forces during their operations in the town of Khan Yunis, “breaks my heart,” the official said.

Speaking to reporters in Geneva via video link from Jerusalem, he described seeing “medical equipment deliberately broken, ultrasound machines, which, you know, are a very important tool to guarantee safe deliveries, with cut cords.”

“Screens of advanced medical machines, such as those for ultrasound and other materials, had been broken,” added Dominic Allen.

The World Health Organization had described the difficulty of getting such equipment into Gaza before the October 7 war even broke out.

In addition, at al-Khair, another maternity hospital in Khan Younis, “there doesn’t seem to be any medical equipment that works,” he said, lamenting that “there is silence” in the delivery rooms.

“It should be a space where we give life and they just give a strange sense of death,” he emphasized.

Only 10 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals are currently functioning, even partially.