MILANO – After several months of waiting to obtain the humanitarian permit, EMERGENCY entered Gaza to offer basic health care to the population devastated by the war. In recent months, while waiting for the final authorization to enter the Strip, the NGO founded by Gino Strada has worked to define the project and activate coordination with the United Nations agencies and other partners present in the territory.
Limited room for maneuver for aid. “The possibility of bringing aid to the Strip must deal with major limitations in access for humanitarian organizations, with difficult security conditions,” explains Stefano Sozza, head of EMERGENCY’s mission in Gaza, “and with a guaranteed humanitarian space that has been increasingly shrinking from November to today. Today, approximately 305 square kilometers, or almost 84% of the Gaza Strip, have been placed under evacuation orders.”
Al-Mawasi humanitarian area restricted. Since August 12, the humanitarian area in al-Mawasi – a Palestinian Bedouin town on the southern coast of the Gaza Strip – has shrunk from 58.9 square kilometers at the beginning of 2024 to approximately 46 square kilometers today. According to the update of OCHA As of last week, sixty-eight humanitarian missions were denied by the Israeli authorities in the first half of August, approximately a third of the missions scheduled at the beginning of the month.
The urgency of basic care: the few hospitals only deal with emergencies. “Now that we have managed to enter Gaza – continues Sozza – we are looking for an area where we can build and open a clinic to provide basic care to the population. The health needs are enormous and the local hospitals that are still operating cannot handle them all: in addition to not having the necessary staff and medicines, they are often overcrowded because – in the absence of other facilities – the sick turn to hospitals even for needs that could be treated on an outpatient basis. The situation in the Strip is critical and the population is exhausted: in addition to the lack of health services, the most serious problems are the shortage of water, food and housing”.
What Emergency will guarantee. The clinic will provide first aid, stabilization of medical-surgical emergencies and transfer to hospital facilities, basic medical-surgical care for adults and children, outpatient reproductive health activities and post-operative nursing follow-up. At the same time, EMERGENCY will have a logistics base in Jordan to support the operational team in the Palestinian territory.
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– 2024-08-28 05:27:52
