There will only be enough fuel to run hospitals in the southern Gaza Strip for three days, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) has warned, after Israeli forces took control of the Rafah border crossing.
Israel sent ground troops and tanks into the town of Rafah on Tuesday and occupied the nearby border crossing with Egypt, which is the main route for aid to the besieged Palestinian areas.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said fuel, which the United Nations health agency expected to be approved on Wednesday, had been blocked.
Israeli authorities control the flow of humanitarian aid to Gaza.
“The closure of the border crossing continues to prevent the UN from bringing fuel. Without fuel, all humanitarian operations will cease. “Border closures are also hindering the delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza,” Tedros said on X, formerly Twitter.
“Hospitals in southern Gaza only have three days of fuel left, meaning operations could soon cease.”
Israel has threatened a major attack on Rafah to defeat thousands of Hamas fighters it says are holed up there. But the city is also a refuge for more than 1.4 million Palestinians who have fled fighting further north in the coastal enclave under previous Israeli evacuation orders.
They are crammed into tent camps and emergency shelters and suffer from shortages of food, water and medicine. The main maternity hospital in Rafah, where almost half of all births in Gaza take place, has stopped accepting patients, the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) told Reuters.
The UNFPA said the hospital, Al-Helal Al-Emairati Maternity Hospital, treated about 85 of Gaza’s 180 births each day before Israel’s invasion of the city.
Medical Aid for Palestine (MAP) said it received an update from Marwan Homs, the head of Abu Youssef al-Najjar Hospital in Rafah, who said the facility was no longer functional with all staff ordered to evacuate had been.
“This was Rafah’s largest hospital,” MAP said.
“This means that Rafah’s already overburdened and underfunded health system is left with only the Kuwaiti Hospital, an NGO hospital with around 100,000 residents [a] 16 bed capacity; Marwani Field Hospital, which is a trauma stabilization point only; and Al-Emairati Hospital, which is only a maternity hospital,” it added.
The dire warnings come as Palestinian officials in Gaza accused Israel of deliberately stopping the flow of aid into the Strip and targeting medical facilities.
Israeli forces are “deliberately worsening the humanitarian situation by stopping the import of aid from the Rafah and Karem Abu Salem crossings and targeting hospitals and schools in eastern Rafah,” said Salama Marouf, spokesman for the Gaza Strip government’s media office, told reporters about the latter intersection by its Arabic name. In Hebrew it is also known as Kerem Shalom.
Israel says it is not restricting aid deliveries to Gaza.
Hamas said its fighters were fighting Israeli forces in eastern Rafah. The Israeli military said its troops had discovered Hamas infrastructure in several locations in eastern Rafah and were carrying out targeted raids on the Gaza side of the Rafah crossing as well as airstrikes across the Gaza Strip.
Israel has ordered tens of thousands of civilians, many of whom have already been displaced multiple times, to move to an “enhanced humanitarian zone” in al-Mawasi, about 20 km (12 miles) away. Rafah Mayor Ahmed Al-Sofi said the coastal region lacked all “the necessities of life.”
Neighborhoods, hospitals and schools where tens of thousands of people have sought refuge “are being attacked by Israeli forces in Rafah,” Maarouf said.
“The reality in the eastern governorate of Rafah points to a real humanitarian catastrophe,” he said.
More than 35 Palestinians were killed in the last 24-hour reporting period, according to the enclave’s health authorities.
Khalil al-Daghran, a Gaza Health Ministry official, speaking alongside Maarouf, said the closure of the Rafah crossing had prevented dozens of wounded and sick Palestinians from seeking treatment abroad and those whom Egypt allowed to leave Gaza on Tuesday were prevented from doing so.
The situation of the sick and wounded in the Gaza Strip is “very difficult” and has been that way since the Israeli attack began due to the severe lack of medical care, al-Daghran said.
He called on the international community and the administration of US President Joe Biden to pressure Israel to end its attack and immediately reopen border crossings.
About 50,000 people have left Rafah since Monday, when the Israeli invasion began, an official at the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) said.
According to UNRWA, an average of 200 people are leaving Rafah every hour – mostly to Deir el-Balah in central Gaza and the largely destroyed southern city of Khan Younis.