Gaza doctors cram babies into incubators as fuel shortage threatens hosps
GAZA: At Gaza’s largest hospital, doctors say crippling fuel shortages have led them to put several premature babies in a single incubator as they struggle to keep the newborns alive while Israel presses on with its military campaign.Medics say dwindling fuel supplies threaten to plunge them into darkness and paralyse hospitals and clinics in the territory, where health services have been pummelled during 21 months of war. An Israeli military official said around 160,000 litres of fuel destined for hospitals and other humanitarian facilities had entered Gaza since Wednesday, but its distribution was not under Israel’s purview. While PM Benjamin Netanyahu discussed the fate of Israeli hostages in Gaza with US President Donald Trump in Washington this week, patients at Al Shifa medical centre in Gaza City faced imminent danger, doctors there said. “We are forced to place four, five, or sometimes three premature babies in one incubator,” said Dr Mohammed Abu Selmia, Al Shifa’s director.“Premature babies are now in a very critical condition.” The threat comes from “neither an airstrike nor a missile – but a siege choking the entry of fuel,” said Dr Muneer Alboursh, director general of Gaza ministry of health. The shortage is “depriving these vulnerable people of their basic right to medical care, turning the hospital into a silent graveyard”.The Israeli military official said such depictions were creating “a false narrative”. UN bodies working in Gaza decide how to distribute fuel and he did not know if fuel had reached Al Shifa yet, he said. WHO has described the health sector in Gaza as being “on its knees”, with shortages of fuel, medical supplies and frequent arrivals of mass casualties. Just half of Gaza’s 36 general hospitals are partially functioning, according to the UN agency.Abu Selmia said Al Shifa’s dialysis department had been shut down to protect the intensive care unit and operating rooms, which can’t be without electricity for even a few minutes. There are around 100 premature babies in Gaza City hospitals whose lives are at serious risk, he said. Before the war, there were 110 incubators in northern Gaza compared to about 40 now, said Abu Selmia.Officials at Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis are also wondering how they will cope with the fuel crisis. The hospital needs 4,500 litre of fuel per day and it now has only 3,000 litre, said hospital spokesperson Mohammed Sakr. Doctors are performing surgeries without electricity or air conditioning. The sweat from staff is dripping into patients’ wounds, he said. “You can have the best hospital staff on the planet, but if they are denied the medicines and the pain killers and now the very means for a hospital to have light … it becomes an impossibility,” said James Elder, a Unicef spokesperson, recently returned from Gaza.(This is a Reuters story)
