Around 7,000 patients and wounded Palestinians are facing imminent death with Gaza hospitals set to collapse amid lack of fuel, the spokesman for the Palestinian Ministry of Health told Al- Jazeera.
Doctors and health officials have been warning for days that fuel is set to run out completely by Thursday. They say this will lead to the instant death of thousands of people, including newborn babies in incubators, wounded people in ICU units, and kidney dialysis patients, among others.
The World Health Organization (WHO) also said on Tuesday, “Unless vital fuel and additional health supplies are urgently delivered into Gaza, thousands of vulnerable patients risk death or medical complications as critical services shut down due to lack of power."
At least six hospitals in Gaza have been forced to close due to a lack of fuel, the WHO said. That is in addition to hospitals that had to close due to damage from aerial attacks, it said in a statement.
Some of those vulnerable patients include about 1,000 people who are dependent on dialysis and at least 130 premature babies, the organization said in the statement. Other people in intensive care or those who need surgery also "depend on a stable and uninterrupted supply of electricity to stay alive", it added.
The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) also stressed the urgent need for fuel to be permitted into the Gaza Strip and echoed the WHO in calling for an immediate ceasefire.
“Fuel is of paramount importance for the operation of essential facilities such as hospitals, desalination plants, and water pumping stations,” UNICEF said in a statement Tuesday.
“Neonatal intensive care units house over 100 newborns, some of whom are in incubators and rely on mechanical ventilation, making an uninterrupted power supply a matter of life and death," it said.
Meanwhile, Juliette Touma, director of communications at the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), told Al- Jazeera the organisation faces the prospect of having to suspend its humanitarian assistance in Gaza amid a lack of fuel.
“If we do not get an urgent shipment of fuel in the coming 24 hours, we might be forced to hold our humanitarian operations – one of the largest in the history of this UN agency," Touma added.
“We are hosting 600,000 people in over 160 underground facilities, including schools, medical facilities, and other buildings like warehouses … We’re so stretched that we have to open warehouses to receive the displaced," Touma said.
“Supplies are also running out, so we will not be able to give any supplies to [Palestinians in Gaza]. We will not be able to do very simple things like start our fleet of cars or turn on the trucks and go pick up those supplies that are coming in from the borders," she said.
“We have been supporting, for example, bakeries in the Gaza Strip with wheat flour that needs cars to deliver that wheat flour. And just the very basics of our humanitarian operations, we won’t be able to continue to do [that] … We need fuel, and we need it urgently,” she added.
Israel launched the war on Gaza on October 7 after the Palestinian Hamas resistance group waged a surprise operation against the occupying entity. So far more than 6,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli air raids, including more than 2,360 children and 1,290 women. Israel also ordered a complete blockade of the Gaza Strip, home to more than 2 million people, cutting off supplies of water, food and fuel.
