Israeli troops withdraw from Gaza City’s Shifa Hospital on Monday
Neonatal mortality in the Gaza Strip has risen sharply and babies are born underweight, the World Health Organization said on Tuesday, citing local medical staff.
WHO spokesperson Margaret said: “Different doctors, especially those in maternity hospitals, have reported that they have seen a significant increase in children who are born with low birth weight and who are too small to outlive their newborns. period,” Harris told a news conference in Geneva.
At Kamal Adwan, northern Gaza’s only pediatric hospital, “at least 15 malnourished children are admitted every day, and the need is becoming more severe,” she said.
Because of the devastation in the Palestinian territories after six months of war between Israel and Hamas, the World Health Organization has been unable to establish precise statistics on child mortality, and Harris said many did not even go to hospital.
Citing a stabilization center opened last week, she said hospitalized patients are often children with illnesses and malnutrition.
“If you have an underlying disease, malnutrition will kill you faster, so they become the most urgent patients,” she said.
Israeli forces on Monday withdrew from Gaza City’s Shifa hospital after a two-week military operation that left much of the hospital in ruins and bodies scattered on the dusty ground.
The hospital is the largest in the Palestinian territories.
“The Shifa Medical Complex is gone forever,” its acting director Marwaan Abu Saadah said in a video shot by WHO at the site.
“It is no longer able to operate as a hospital in any shape or form,” Harris added.
“Destroying Al-Shifa means stripping out the heart of the health system,” she said, noting that it was a large hospital with 750 beds, 25 operating rooms and 30 intensive care units.
Israel says it has fought Palestinian militants inside the complex, killing at least 200 people and recovering stockpiles of weapons, explosives and cash.
According to AFP statistics based on official Israeli statistics, Hamas launched an attack on October 7, erupting the bloodiest Gaza war in history, resulting in the death of approximately 1,160 people in Israel, most of whom were civilians.
According to the health ministry in Hamas-controlled Gaza, Israeli retaliation has killed at least 32,916 people, mostly women and children.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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