United Nations: A large-scale Israeli assault on Rafah would cause an “unimaginable human catastrophe,” World Health Organization (WHO) doctors in Gaza have warned. Dr Rik Peeperkorn, a WHO representative based in Rafah, said the three remaining hospitals in southern Gaza were urgently preparing for a possible attack, but warned that contingency plans were far from sufficient.
Military activity in such a densely populated area would cause “an incomprehensible catastrophe, an unimaginable human catastrophe,” he said. It would wreak “devastation” on civilians. Intense fighting and airstrikes around Rafah in recent days have raised fears that a full-scale military invasion of the area, home to more than 1.4 million Gazans, is imminent. Earlier, the UN’s top humanitarian official, Martin Griffiths, said an attack on Rafah “could lead to defeat”, flatly rejecting allegations of years of collusion with non-medical partners either in or under Gaza’s hospitals.
“We certainly cannot be more vocal in saying that no, there is no collusion between the WHO and any other health entities, health partners, in the (local) Ministry of Health that we work with,” said Dr. Teresa Zakaria. , WHO incident manager for the conflict in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT). “However, we are not in a position to investigate any other activities going on in the hospitals or what is happening under the hospitals. I’m sure you can also appreciate that in hospitals with a lot of patients and a lot of displaced people, when we focus on providing the service that we actually do, we’re not in a position to look beyond that service. provisions that we have to fulfill,” she added.
In an interview from Gaza, Dr. Peeperkorn also insisted that hospitals “should never be militarized” and that “all eyes” are on hostilities and the feared large-scale offensive in Rafah. “You see the fear people face,” he said. “People keep coming up with questions (asking) ‘What can we do?'” The development comes as hospital facilities are “totally overburdened and under-capacity … and almost on the brink of collapse,” continued Dr. Peeperkorn and noted that 1.5 million Gazans are now crammed into makeshift UNRWA tents and shelters “all over” Rafah.
A WHO health official described the few remaining partially functioning hospitals in Rafah as “completely overwhelmed, overcrowded and undersupplied”, noting that as of November, only 30 percent of WHO missions to the north were handled by Israeli authorities. “Since January, that number has been much lower,” said Dr. Peeperkorn, adding that only about 45 percent of requests for missions to the south have been processed. “This is absurd, even if there is no truce; humanitarian corridors should exist so that the WHO, the UN and partners can do their work,” he stressed.
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“We need a complete deconfliction system to do our job. The UN, the WHO, is ready to carry out more and more missions to the north, to the center, to the south. After more than four months of intense Israeli bombardment, health authorities in Gaza reported that more than 28,000 people – mostly women and children – had been killed. Aid workers are doing “almost impossible to help people in need, despite the risks,” Griffiths, the UN emergency chief, said in a statement on Tuesday. Warning that aid workers remain at risk without security guarantees and strikes in Rafah continue, the veteran aid official also urged Israel to heed repeated calls from the international community to back down from the ground invasion and its “dangerous consequences”.
Nowhere in Gaza is safe and people uprooted by violence – including rocket fire from northern Gaza towards Israel – still have nowhere to go, Mr Griffiths said, as he warned of a further deterioration in living conditions marked by an “acute lack of safe areas”. , shelters, clean water, food and medicine”. In rare good news, the UN’s top aid coordinator noted that a brief lull in heavy fighting in Khan Younis — particularly near Nasser and Al Amal hospitals — allowed volunteers on Monday to “leave Nasser Hospital and divert sewage from a broken pipe that was flooding the emergency and threatened to shut it down.”
He said this was possible after the UN Office for Humanitarian Affairs, OCHA, coordinated a local three-hour pause approved by the Israeli military while permanent repairs to the pipeline are still pending. The UN humanitarian chief, citing the latest figures on damage to schools in Gaza, said 162 school buildings had been directly hit since October 7. This represents nearly 30 percent of the total 563 school buildings in the enclave, according to a joint UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF)/Save The Children report. “At least 26 of these buildings have been destroyed. Approximately 175,000 students and more than 6,500 teachers have been directly affected by the hostilities. At least 55 percent of Gaza’s schools will require either complete or extensive reconstruction,” the report said.
