THE HEAD OF the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) health emergencies programme has said that a ceasefire would be “the best medicine for the children of Gaza”.
Mike Ryan also warned that the population of Gaza is facing “a public health crisis beyond the crisis of direct wounds and injuries”, with children in the besieged territory suffering from dehydration and a “very high” risk of a diarrheal disease outbreak.
The WHO led two joint humanitarian missions to Al-Shifa hospital with staff from the United Nations (UN) and the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS), with the organisation describing the hospital as a “death zone”.
The teams were able to evacuate the 31 premature babies along with six members of staff and their families, though 250 patients and around 20 staff members remain at the hospital.
Speaking on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland programme, Ryan said the babies are being cared for at the Emirati hospital in the southern part of Gaza and have been stabilised, but a number of them are “in a critical condition”.
“That hospital is already under significant pressure but they do have a paediatric intensive care facility. The babies are being rehydrated, being managed for sepsis and warming their body’s up, essentially. Their body temperatures were low,” he said.
He said there are names and family member names for most of the babies, but they have been separated from their families, adding that the WHO will be working with UNICEF and other child protection agencies to reunite them.
“There is a very terrible acronym at the moment and it’s WCNSP, which is ‘Wounded Child No Surviving Parents’. This has been such a common element,” he said.
“There are so many children that have lost parents and I remind you that there are children still held hostage by Hamas, Israeli children as well.
This is a tragedy for children on what is World Children’s Day.
WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said yesterday that further missions are being planned to evacuate the remaining patients and staff out of Al-Shifa Hospital, pending guarantees of safe passage by parties to the conflict.
Many of those patients are very seriously ill and very, very difficult to move, according to Ryan.
“We have a number of serious head injuries, spinal injuries, complicated fractures and 22 patients on dialysis. The dialysis machines are no longer functioning,” he said.
“We’ve had six weeks of no water, no food, very little supplies. We have managed to resupply Al-Shifa twice, but it’s a drop in the ocean of need. The facility has essentially been put beyond use as a medical facility and those patients are now only getting the barest of care and they do need to be evacuated as soon as possible.”
He said the remaining staff are very frightened and stressed. “But they’re doing what doctors and nurses do all over the world. To the extent possible they’re staying with their patients to provide whatever care they can.”
Less than 10 of the 36 hospitals in Gaza are currently functioning. Ryan said that Al-Shifa has been put beyond use as a medical facility.
“Al-Shifa was the most sophisticated. Maybe the equivalent in Ireland would be St Vincent’s or Beaumont, it’s a major referral centre and it has been the heartbeat of healthcare in Gaza for 75 years,” he said.
“There are other hospitals in the north that are now effectively closed as well and the hospitals in the south were less sophisticated. They were more like district hospitals. The sophisticated healthcare that people would need, the casualty management, the trauma management, the reconstructive surgery. All of that was based in the north.
“The hospitals in the south are much more simple infrastructures. They’re now having to deal with three times the population displaced to the south with less than one third of the hospitals.”
Ryan said the WHO saw evidence of bomb damage and gunfire at the hospital. He said they did not see evidence of Hamas infrastructure, but “that’s not what we were there to do”.
He said a ceasefire is “absolutely essential for everyone”.
Nowhere is safe in Gaza. The best medicine for the children of Gaza now is a ceasefire.
Speaking on the same programme, former president Mary Robinson has called for the development of a peace plan.
Robinson is chair of the Elders, an international non-governmental organisation of public figures noted as elder statesmen and human rights advocates.
The organisation has written an open letter to US President Joe Biden, urging him to set out a serious peace plan, and help build a new coalition for peace to deliver it.
She told RTÉ’s Morning Ireland that the development of the plan would influence Israel’s actions in the conflict.
“What Israel is doing at the moment is a military solution. There is no military solution. That is not a way to try to bring about safety either for Israelis or Palestinians. It’s very disruptive, it’s disproportionate and it’s without a plan. That’s why it’s necessary,” she said.
“The United States has the responsibility in the sense that they are the influential country, they have been backing Israel, backing it too much in the sense of not putting enough conditions on how Israel would respond to the horrendous attacks of Hamas, which we condemned in our earlier statement.”
The open letter states that the prospective plan “should answer who runs Gaza next, end Israel’s accelerating annexation of Palestinian land, and address Israel’s legitimate security concerns”.
Robinson said Gaza has to be part of a Palestinian-run state but “whether Hamas plays any part in that is an open question”.
“There are two sides to Hamas. There’s the Hamas that has administered Gaza and before t7 October, all the evidence was that Hamas was extremely unpopular because they were very arbitrary, cutting down on rights, especially women’s rights, LGBTI rights,” she said.
“But there is that administrative side and there is the brigade side, the army side of Hamas, that carried out those horrendous attacks that have had such horrible consequences for the people of Gaza.”
Robinson, who is a former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said she does not think that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu can be part of a coalition for peace.
“I think we feel that Netanyahu has never shown a disposition even during easier times, if I could put it that way,” she said.
“For all the coalition’s that he’s been involved in, he has encouraged the widening of settlements, the encroachments on land of Palestinians and making it impossible to have a two state solution. That’s been his policy. It’s more overt now because he has right wing colleagues who talk the language of Jewish supremacy and talk about their right to the whole West back.”
She said a “full blown commitment to the two-state solution” is needed.
“It’s very hard to say [what form it will take] at the moment, because it needs new leadership in Israel and new leadership in the Palestinian side.
If people believe that there is a peace plan with a solid coalition behind it, it will change things of what’s happening now.
“That’s the real point that the elders are concerned about. What’s happening now is deadly and awful and shocking for people to even look at on television sets nevermind endure in Gaza and endure in the pain of the families of hostages,” she said.
“We have to have a real political effort.”
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