Agencies
Tel Aviv/Gaza
Aid organisation Doctors Without Borders has suspended work at the Indonesian Hospital in the Gaza Strip city of Rafah as Israel’s offensive gathers pace.
The 22 remaining patients have been transferred to other facilities as their safety could no longer be guaranteed, a spokeswoman said on Tuesday.
Doctors Without Borders outlined the struggles it has faced since the war in Gaza between Israel and Palestinian Hamas began in October.
“We have had to leave 12 different health structures and have endured 26 violent incidents, which include airstrikes damaging hospitals, tanks being fired at agreed ... shelters, ground offensives into medical centres and convoys fired upon,” emergency coordinator Michel-Olivier Lacharité said in a statement.
According to the UN emergency relief organisation OCHA, 24 out of 36 hospitals in the Gaza Strip are no longer in operation. Doctors Without Borders says it is trying to set up field hospitals but these cannot replace a functioning healthcare system and cannot cope with an influx of wounded civilians.
Wefaq, a local partner of aninternational charity, has said it paused humanitarian operations in the southern Gaza Strip city.
This came as ActionAid warned that aid operations could grind to a “complete halt” with aid workers facing an “unprecedented” level of danger that is making their jobs “impossible”. The charity says that aid workers in Rafah are “experiencing the same inhumane living conditions as the rest of the population” and that “virtually no aid” has entered Gaza in recent days.
Meanwhile, aid trucks carrying humanitarian aid supplies for Gaza have been destroyed by fire in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
Video obtained by the Reuters news agency shows trucks beside the separation wall in Beit Awwa, west of Hebron, fully engulfed in flames. Firefighters work to extinguish the fire but the vehicles and contents appear destroyed. On Monday, Israelis blocked aid trucks in the latest incident in a series of attacks on humanitarian relief headed for the war-battered coastal enclave.
