WHO loses communication with contacts in Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza

The World Health Organisation (WHO) reported on Sunday that it has lost communication with its contacts inside Al-Shifa Hospital. “As horrifying reports of the hospital facing repeated attacks continue to emerge, we assume our contacts joined tens of thousands of displaced people and are fleeing the area,” the WHO said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter. The organisation later reported that some people who attempted to flee the hospital were “shot at, wounded and even killed.” The UN has reported that as Israel intensified its shelling and ground attacks around hospitals in Gaza City and northern Gaza, it “directly hit” multiple hospitals. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in the occupied Palestinian Territories reported that power was apparently cut off at the Indonesian Hospital and Al-Shifa in northern Gaza due to a generator’s fuel running out. As a result of the fighting and bombardment, failed generators at Al-Quds Hospital in Gaza City could not be fixed while a mass number of Gazans on Saturday fled the area in search of safety in the south, and hundreds of thousands of those who stayed behind struggled to obtain basic necessities. Additionally, individuals are consuming water from “unsafe sources,” which “raises serious concerns about waterborne diseases and dehydration.” Muslim nations called on Saturday for an immediate end to Israel’s brutal military operations in Gaza, rejecting its claim that it was acting in self-defence. In a final communique issued following the extraordinary joint Islamic-Arab summit in Riyadh, the International Criminal Court was urged to investigate Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Palestinian territories. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi kingdom’s de facto ruler, gathered Arab and Muslim leaders to push the United States and Israel towards a ceasefire in Gaza. Many leaders attended the meeting, including Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, Qatar’s Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who rejoined the Arab League this year.