GENEVA: The UN Palestinian refugee agency's fuel depot in Gaza has run dry and within a few days UNRWA will no longer be able to resupply hospitals, remove sewage and provide drinking water, its chief said on Monday.
UNRWA is sheltering nearly 800,000 people, or about half of the total population of Gazans who have fled their homes since an Israeli military campaign began over a month ago.
The agency chief, Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini, told donors on Monday that it had been slowly emptying a fuel depot on the Israeli border containing strategic reserves.
A request to the Israeli military to replenish it had gone unanswered, he said.
"That reservoir is now empty," Lazzarini said.
"If we project out a couple of days, by the 14th of November this will severely impact ambulances and major hospital operations. Some of them (hospitals) have a bit of solar but it is marginal, so those hospitals cease functioning," he said.
Already, many hospitals have had to close in Gaza due to war damage or lack of fuel, including Al Quds, one of the major hospitals in the north of Gaza that has been the focus of Israel's ground invasion.
Israel's military has so far refused imports of fuel into Gaza.
UNRWA's fuel is also used to remove hundreds of tonnes of solid waste from increasingly overcrowded camps in southern Gaza, and Lazzarini said these services would soon halt.
Without fuel, desalination plants in the narrow, densely populated coastal strip used to provide drinking water to support at least 290,000 people will also stop on November 15, he added.
"So the situation is very dire now and it's about to get much worse," Lazzarini told donors.
Israeli forces reached the gates of Gaza City's main hospital on Monday, the primary target in their battle to seize control of the northern half of the Gaza Strip, where medics said patients including newborn babies were dying for lack of fuel.
Gaza health ministry spokesperson Ashraf al Qidra, who was inside Al Shifa hospital, said 32 patients had died in the past three days, including three newborn babies, as a result of the siege of the hospital and the cut-off of its power.
At least 650 patients were still inside, desperate to be evacuated to another medical facility by the Red Cross or some other neutral agency.
"The tanks are in front of the hospital. We are under full blockade. It’s a totally civilian area. Only hospital facility, hospital patients, doctors and other civilians staying in the hospital. Someone should stop this," a surgeon at the hospital, Dr Ahmed El Mokhallalati, said by telephone.
"They bombed the (water) tanks, they bombed the water wells, they bombed the oxygen pump as well. They bombed everything in the hospital. So we are hardly surviving. We tell everyone, the hospital is no more a safe place for treating patients. We are harming patients by keeping them here." — Reuters
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