About half of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents are crammed into Rafah. (File)
London:
The main maternity hospital in the Gaza Strip’s busy southern city of Rafah has stopped admitting patients, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) said on Wednesday.
UNFPA told Reuters that the hospital, Al Helal Al Emirati Maternity Hospital, had handled some 85 of a total of 180 births a day in Gaza, ahead of an escalation of fighting between Hamas and Israeli forces on the outskirts of Rafah .
About half of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents are trapped in Rafah after fleeing other parts of the enclave during seven months of war.
Israel has threatened a major attack on Rafah to defeat thousands of Hamas fighters it says are hiding there. About 10,000 Palestinians have left Rafah since Monday, an official from the UN agency for Palestinian refugees said on Wednesday.
The Emirati Hospital has only five delivery beds. But after the massive influx of people to Rafah that began in December due to Israeli airstrikes and fighting further north, the hospital became the main place for women to give birth in Rafah, said Dominic Allen, UNFPA’s top official for the occupied Palestinian territories. in an interview with Reuters last month.
Other hospitals in the city, such as Abu Youssef al-Najjar Hospital, have been admitting war wounded for months and sending women in labor to the Emirates.
It was not immediately clear where women in Rafah who were trying to give birth in a hospital would be able to do so. “Humanitarian partners, in coordination with the Ministry of Health, have established alternative health facilities that can provide different levels of care,” the UNFPA statement to Reuters said.
The World Health Organization hopes the Emirates will not be forced to close, the WHO’s top official for Gaza and the West Bank, Richard Peeperkorn, later told a news conference.
But since the latest escalation of the war, he said, some women in Rafah were going to field hospitals in Rafah run by charities including the International Medical Corps.
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UNFPA also recently brought “mobile maternity services” to Rafah, although some of the UN agency’s equipment was stuck at the border crossing with Egypt before this week, he added.
An American midwife currently doing Emirati volunteer work told Reuters on Wednesday afternoon that new patients were still being admitted to hospital, but fewer women had arrived to give birth in recent days.
Bridget Rochios, who volunteers at the Canada-based medical charity Glia Project, said hospital workers have had to leave work early or not come at all to evacuate their families since Monday, when Israel told Palestinians to evacuate parts of Rafah.
“We are also low on supplies and expect this problem to be exacerbated by the closure of the Rafah crossing,” she said in a WhatsApp text message.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
