Pregnant women in Gaza often shot in the abdomen: Volunteer doctor
The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has said that Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza has damaged or destroyed 94 percent of the Gaza Strip’s hospitals.
Maternity wards and neonatal ICUs have also been attacked by Israeli forces, leaving pregnant women and newborns struggling for medical services.
“As we did our rounds, bombs were going off in the background,” Dr Ambereen Sleemi, a gynaecologist who volunteered in Gaza, told the UN. “Sometimes quadcopters would come in and try to shoot nurses or literally chase them through the hospital corridors.”
Sleemi said that some pregnant women also came to the hospital after having been shot, sometimes in the abdomen. Israel’s blockade has also fuelled shortages of basic medical supplies.
“Many women were simply too injured to survive,” she said. “If their injuries did not claim their lives, then sepsis often did, as there were not enough medical supplies or antibiotics.”
WHO warns disease outbreaks may be going unreported in Gaza
Diseases may be spreading largely undetected due to the near-total collapse of surveillance and laboratory systems in the Palestinian territory, Teresa Zakaria, WHO’s unit head for humanitarian and disaster action, said.
She added that the living conditions in Gaza are so severe that “we can’t even describe it anymore”.
During a briefing in Geneva, she said that humanitarian access and diagnostic capacities remain “very limited” in Gaza, making early detection and response nearly impossible.
“What is very important here to highlight is that we are probably missing the vast majority of diseases that are spreading in the territory at the moment just because we have not been able to detect them,” Zakaria said.
She also reiterated calls for unimpeded deliveries of humanitarian supplies “to revive the health system and be able to detect these diseases” in Gaza.
