The Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip has claimed more than 13,000 lives, including over 5,500 children and 3,500 women, the government media office in the Gaza Strip reported on Sunday.
The office also said that more than 30,000 people were injured, 75% of whom were children and women.
The spokesperson for the Ministry of Health in Gaza, Ashraf Al-Qudra, said that 31 premature babies had been evacuated from Al-Shifa Hospital after the death of 8 of them as of Sunday morning. He added that 259 injured people who were unable to move remained in the hospital and that they would be evacuated gradually by the medical teams.
He warned that the health complications of the wounded were increasing due to their overcrowding in hospitals and that burns and deep wounds required full medical capabilities to save them.
He urged the United Nations to intervene quickly to provide healthcare to the displaced. He also said that the process of removing the wounded from the Gaza Strip was slow and that only a few people could leave.
The Palestinian Red Crescent announced that its ambulance crews, in coordination with the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, evacuated 31 premature babies from Al-Shifa Hospital on Sunday. The babies were transferred to the Emirates Hospital in Rafah.
The WHO said that it led a mission to Al-Shifa Hospital, west of Gaza City, on Saturday, and that it was working on developing plans to evacuate the hospital, which it described as a “death zone.” The organization said, in a statement on Sunday, that there were still 25 health workers and 291 patients in Al-Shifa Hospital, and that many patients had died over the past days due to the closure of medical services.
It added: “Our teams stayed for only one hour in Al-Shifa Hospital due to the security situation, and they described it as a death zone.”
The organization said that Al-Shifa Hospital could no longer receive patients and that the wounded and sick were now being transferred to the Indonesian Hospital, which was “suffering from severe pressure and was barely functioning.”
In a related context, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan said that ministers from Arab and Islamic countries would visit China on Monday, as the first stop on a tour aimed at ending the war on Gaza.
Faisal said, on the sidelines of a conference in Bahrain, that the tour would be the first step in implementing the decisions reached at the joint Arab-Islamic summit, which was held in Riyadh this month.
