Gaza’s only cancer hospital goes out of service amid constant Israeli bombardment
Health officials say the only cancer treatment hospital in the Gaza Strip has gone out of service after it ran out of fuel amid the ongoing Israeli bombardment of the besieged enclave.
Subhi Skaik, the director of the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital said during a press briefing on Wednesday that the hospital, which mainly treats cancer patients, had used up its fuel and was now out of service.
“We tell the world don’t leave cancer patients to a certain death due to the hospital being out of service,” the director, Subhi Skaik, was quoted as saying
Palestinian Health Minister Mai al-Kaila in a statement confirmed that this brings the total number of hospitals not operating right now in the Strip to 16 out of 35.
“The lives of 70 cancer patients inside the hospital are seriously threatened,” the statement read
“The number of cancer patients in the Gaza Strip is about 2,000 living in catastrophic health conditions as a result of the ongoing Israeli aggression on the Strip and the displacement of a large number,” al-Kaila added.
Urgent final call for assistance
Meanwhile, the Gaza Health Ministry has issued an urgent final call for assistance as the al-Shifaa Hospital and Indonesian Hospital faced a critical shortage of fuel on Tuesday evening.
The spokesman for the Ministry of Health in Gaza, Ashraf Al-Qudra, emphasized the urgent need for intervention from the international community to save the lives of those in the hospitals.
“Plea, plea, to all countries of the world to take urgent action to save the wounded and sick in al-Shifaa Medical Complex and the Indonesian Hospital, as we are only a few hours away from stopping the main generators in Al-Shifaa Medical Complex and the Indonesian Hospital, and this is what we feared and warned against repeatedly,” he said.
Elsewhere in his remarks, al-Qudra warned that the discontinuation of the generators would have severe consequences for over 650 kidney failure patients at Al-Shifaa Medical Complex and the Indonesian Hospital, as well as 62 individuals relying on artificial respiration in intensive care units, and 42 newborn babies in need of life support equipment in the children’s incubators.
