Gaza Health Situation: WHO Briefing | United Nations

Описание: Sean Casey, Health Emergency Officer, World Health Organization (WHO), will brief on the health situation in Gaza.

Upon his return from a five-week deployment in Gaza, the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Emergency Medical Team Coordinator in the Palestinian enclave Sean Casey, today (17 Jan) said, “overall, most critical need is really a cease fire, because everything short of that is simply addressing needs on a day-by-day basis.”

Talking to reporters in New York, he said, “I saw evidence again and again of the simultaneous humanitarian catastrophe that's unfolding. We see it every day in Gaza, getting worse and worse. And the collapse of the health system day by day, with hospitals closing, health workers fleeing, casualties continuing to stream. And lack of access to medicines and medical supplies, a lack of access to fuel to run the hospital generators to keep the lights on, to keep the machines running.”

Casey, who has been reporting from the ground as his team delivered supplies and assessed conditions in medical facilities in Gaza, said, “we have been and continue to try to deliver critical medicines, medical consumables, fuel to the functioning hospitals that are still working, trying to continue to surge in additional health workers, doctors and nurses to meet the enormous demand of trauma patients, but also patients with every other clinical presentation that you would normally see; the pregnant women who still need antenatal care and who still need to deliver, people who require dialysis, etc.”

He reported that at Al-Shifa Medical Complex, the largest hospital in Gaza, “basically, the whole hospital was filled with displaced persons. Thousands of them, reportedly tens of thousands of them living in the operating theatres, living in the corridors, living in the stairs, and the emergency department seeing hundreds of patients a day, mostly trauma, with only a handful, literally 5 or 6 doctors or nurses to care for all of those people.”

Casey said he saw “patients on the floor, so many that you could barely move without stepping on somebody's hands or feet.”

In Al-Ahli Hospital, he saw “patients who were lying on church pews, basically waiting to die in a hospital that had no fuel, no power, no water, very, very little in the way of medical supplies, and only a handful of staff remaining to take care of them.”

The Emergency Coordinator said, “I saw patients in hospitals every day with severe burns, with open fractures, waiting hours or days for care, and they would often ask me for food or water. It demonstrates the level of desperation that we see. So, in addition to their injuries and illnesses, they're just crying out for the basics of life. What could change those dynamics? Access is an enormous one. The ability to move people and supplies safely and quickly. We're talking about lifesaving skills and lifesaving supplies.”

During his deployment, Casey visited six medical facilities out of 16 that are still functioning, and 36 that were operational before the war.