Ginebra. The UN denounced on Friday the “intentional” destruction of medical equipment in Gaza hospitals and maternities besieged by Israel and warned about the increase in births “in inhuman and unimaginable conditions” in that Palestinian territory.
Two recent UN missions to hospitals in the Gaza Strip found that many were “in ruins” and that only a few were still able to provide maternal and child care services, reported the representative of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). for Palestine, Dominic Allen.
“What I have seen breaks my heart (…). It is indescribable,” Allen said, referring to the situation at the Naser hospital in the city of Khan Younis, in the south of the Gaza Strip, which suffered a prolonged Israeli military siege.
“What we see there is medical equipment broken on purpose; ultrasound machines (…) with cables that have been cut and other complex medical equipment with shattered screens,” he explained in a press video conference from Jerusalem with journalists in Geneva.
There was an “intentional and gratuitous destruction in motherhood,” he stressed.
The World Health Organization (WHO) had already pointed out the difficulty of bringing this type of material to Gaza even before the Israeli offensive against the Islamist movement Hamas, which governs Gaza, in response to the bloody incursion of militiamen in the south of Israel, October 7.
In Al Jair, another maternity hospital in Khan Yunis, “it seems that there is no longer any medical equipment that works,” he noted.
Of Gaza’s 36 hospitals, only ten are still functioning, albeit partially, he noted.
In their Oct. 7 raid, Islamist commandos killed 1,170 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP count based on official Israeli data.
The Israeli offensive left at least 34,012 dead, the vast majority of them civilians, according to the balance sheet of the Ministry of Health of the Hamas government in Gaza.
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– 2024-04-22 07:35:51
