GENEVA: The situation in the Gaza Strip is getting worse all the time and approaching humanity’s “darkest hour”, the World Health Organisation said on Tuesday.

Richard Peeperkorn, the WHO’s representative in the occupied Palestinian territories, told reporters, via video link from Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, that the number of people on the move from central and southern Gaza was “vastly increasing”.

“The situation is getting worse by the hour. There is intensified bombing going on all around, including here in the southern areas,” said Peeperkorn. “We are close by humanity’s darkest hour,” Peeperkorn said.

World health body empties aid warehouse in south after Israeli army’s advice

“These bombings and the senseless loss of life must stop now, and we need a sustained ceasefire.”

WHO warehouses

Early in the crisis, the WHO established two adjacent warehouses in Khan Yunis in southern Gaza but said it had to find a smaller one in Rafah after being advised to move by Israel’s military.

“We comply because we want to make sure that you can actually deliver essential medical supplies,” said Peeperkorn.

“When you are advised by an army that... you have 24 hours and after that... it’s very unlikely you can reach your warehouse, of course you comply,” Peeperkorn said.

The WHO managed to scramble out 90 per cent of the stockpile in “a panic movement”. “And we had to abort the mission we were planning to do to bring supplies to the hospitals.”

“This... should be our top priority, to get a sustained line of the most essential medical supplies, trauma supplies, essential drugs into Gaza,” and then distribute it to health facilities. He said the amount of aid that the WHO had been able to bring into Gaza was “way too little”.

“For this kind of humanitarian disaster, where we are in an increasing disaster, we need much more supplies and equipment in,” he said.

Beds and diseases

Eighteen of the Gaza Strip’s 36 hospitals are still functioning in any capacity: three are providing basic first aid only, while the rest are delivering partial services. Twelve of the 18 are in the south.

There are 1,400 hospital beds still available in the Gaza Strip. The WHO says 5,000 are needed.

Peeperkorn said that since the start of the unrest, there had been 120,000 acute respiratory infections; close to 26,000 people with scabies and lice; 86,000 cases of diarrhoea, including 44,000 among children aged under five, which he said was 20 to 30 times higher than could be expected.

Meanwhile some 1,150 cases of jaundice have been recorded, along with cases of chicken pox, skin rashes and meningitis.

Published in Dawn, December 6th, 2023