WORLD HEALTH: Evacuating thousands of patients from southern Gaza is a “death sentence”

The World Health Organization has warned that the forced evacuation of thousands of patients from northern Gaza to overcrowded health institutions in the south of the Strip would be “a death sentence”.

The United Nations organization said in a statement that it “strongly condemns repeated Israeli orders to evacuate 22 hospitals treating more than 2,000 patients in northern Gaza ,” stressing that due to overcrowding in health institutions in southern Gaza, evacuation would be “a death sentence” for patients.

She added that transferring patients to southern Gaza, “where health facilities are already working at maximum capacity and unable to accommodate the significant increase in the number of patients, may be tantamount to a death sentence.”

The organization confirmed that the lives of many patients with serious illnesses and fragile conditions are now “at stake.”

She pointed to patients in intensive care who depend on life support, newborns in incubators, patients undergoing dialysis, and women who suffer from pregnancy complications.

The World Health Organization said that these and others “all face imminent deterioration in their condition or death if they are forced to move and are cut off from life-saving medical care during their evacuation.”

Israel is bombing the northern Gaza Strip before a likely ground operation in the Strip.

The organization added that health workers in northern Gaza are now facing a “painful choice” between abandoning seriously ill patients, or endangering their lives by remaining in the place, or endangering the lives of their patients while trying to transfer them to southern hospitals “that do not have the capacity to receive them.” “.

The World Health Organization emphasized that “the overwhelming majority of caregivers chose to remain and respect their oath as health professionals.”

“Health workers should never have to make such impossible choices,” she stressed