GENEVA: The World Health Organization (WHO) today welcomed Thursday’s evacuation of 21 cancer-stricken children from the war-torn Gaza Strip, the first since the key Rafah border crossing was closed on 7 May.
‘Since the closure of Rafah, we did not have any medical evacuation until yesterday and these 21 children with cancer,’ said WHO spokesperson Tarik Jasarevic during a press conference in Geneva. ‘We need to reopen Rafah and any other border crossing to get these people out. So, their lives, can be saved,’ he added.
Specialised, lifesaving care is no longer available in Gaza, Jasarevic continued, in an appeal to evacuate the ‘more than 10,000 people’ – including thousands of amputees – waiting to receive the medical care they need.
‘We don’t have estimates of amputees (or) amputations that are performed in Gaza. But what we know that we need an entire system be in place for health workers to save a limb from a child or from an adult,’ the WHO officer said. ‘That includes expertise, staff, supplies, tra
uma care, a referral system…none of this is available in Gaza.’
Meanwhile, panic and desperation now grip ordinary Gazans struggling to survive, UN humanitarians said, amid fuel shortages and dwindling supplies that have prevented aid teams from doing their job.
Speaking from central Gaza where bombing can be heard ‘from the north, the middle and the south’, Senior Communications Officer Louise Wateridge from the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) described the scene as she entered Gaza from the Karm Abu Salem crossing on Thursday.
‘There are hundreds of people waiting for the trucks to enter. They’re desperate, people are desperate. These are very desperate times; people need everything. And when very little trucks and very little amount of aid comes through, of course there’s going to be a huge rush from the population to go and get it. So that is the situation that we’re facing now and the only answer to that is to provide more aid, to provide more food, to provide more medicine.’
Wateridge sai
d that what she saw of nearby Rafah was ‘destroyed’. The city had been her base during her first tour in May, when Israeli occupation forces seized the key border crossing, further hampering aid deliveries into Gaza.
The scene is no different across the shattered enclave but needs have deteriorated sharply since she was last in Rafah before the Israeli military aggression there in early May. ‘I’ve seen nothing like it,’ she told journalists via video link.
‘The Gaza Strip is destroyed. You go back to Khan Younis, I was shocked going through Khan Younis yesterday because the last time I was in Khan Younis, the buildings are skeletons, if at all; everything is rubble and yet people are living there again.’
She added: ‘When the last I was there, it was a ghost town because people had fled for their lives from Khan Younis, there is nothing there, there’s no water there, there’s no sanitation, there’s no food. And now people are living back in these buildings that are empty shells of themselves. You can see whe
re the walls have been blown out and blasted out there; there are you know, sheets in place, blankets in place, people trying to protect themselves from the sun.’
Source: Palestine news & Information Agency – WAFA