KHAN YOUNIS: Within hours of the lapse of a week-old truce between Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza, the enclave's health ministry reported that 54 people had already been killed in Israeli air strikes.
Footage from Nasser Hospital, the second largest in the Gaza strip, showed a steady stream of wounded being brought in as other people wept outside beside bodies of loved ones killed in strikes.
Aid groups and the United Nations say a small fraction of health facilities in the devastated enclave are still functioning and those are in no shape to handle a new wave of casualties.
"Hospitals across Gaza lack the basic supplies, staff and fuel to deliver primary healthcare at the scale needed, let alone safely treat urgent cases," UN Secretary-General António Guterres said on Thursday.
"Gaza's health system has been crippled by the ongoing hostilities," Dr Richard Peeperkorn, the World Health Organisation's representative in Gaza, said.
"It cannot afford to lose any more hospitals or hospital beds," he told reporters by video link. "We are extremely concerned about the resumption of violence."
Rob Holden, a WHO senior emergency officer, told the same briefing that he had visited Al Ahli Hospital in Gaza City on Friday morning.
"The only way to describe it is like a horror movie when you walk in there," he said, adding that there were "patients on the floor with the most traumatic injuries that you can imagine".
After Israel resumed its military campaign on Friday, aid was stranded near Egypt's border with Gaza, with truck drivers saying they expected further delays to a complex delivery process that had speeded up during a week-long truce.
"The bombardment has been going on since seven in the morning. There are planes and artillery and we haven't moved," said driver Saleh Ebada, who had already been waiting to enter the crossing for inspection for eight days when fighting restarted.
A truce over the past week allowed more food, medicines, fuel and water to be delivered, but the quantities remained far less than required for Gaza's 2.3 million residents, most of them internally displaced by the war. — Reuters
Oman Observer is now on the WhatsApp channel. Click here
