GENEVA: The World Health Organization lamented on Wednesday that fewer than half of its requested aid-delivery missions in Gaza have been approved by Israel, stressing the need to reach and resupply devastated hospitals across the territory.
"Hospitals are completely overwhelmed and overflowing and undersupplied," said Rik Peeperkorn, the WHO's representative for the occupied Palestinian territories.
Speaking to reporters in Geneva via video-link from Rafah in southern Gaza, he described how patients were frequently undergoing unnecessary amputations of limbs that could have been saved under ordinary circumstances.
Decrying the "shrinking humanitarian space" in the Gaza Strip, he accused Israel of obstructing aid deliveries across the war-ravaged Palestinian territory.
Since November, only 40 percent of the missions WHO had requested to deliver aid to northern Gaza had been facilitated, he said. "Since January, that figure is much lower."
Only 45 percent of requested missions in southern Gaza had meanwhile been made possible, he said.
"These missions have been denied, impeded or postponed," he said, describing the situation as "absurd".
"Even when there is no ceasefire, humanitarian corridors should exist so WHO, UN and their partners can do their job."
At least 28,576 people, mostly women and children, have been killed in Israel's response, according to the Palestinian health ministry in Gaza.
The latest toll includes 103 people killed over the past 24 hours, a ministry statement said, while 68,291 others have been wounded across Gaza since the war erupted on October 7.
Months of bombardment and siege have deepened a humanitarian crisis, especially in southern Gaza.
"Their living conditions are abysmal," UN humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths said. "They lack the basic necessities to survive, stalked by hunger, disease and death."
UN rights chief Volker Turk charged that Israel was committing a "war crime" with its reported destruction of buildings to create a "buffer zone" along the border inside Gaza.
Israel's "extensive destruction of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly, amounts to a grave breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention, and a war crime", he said in a statement.
Mediators are racing to secure a pause to the fighting before Israel proceeds with a full-scale ground incursion into Rafah, where more than 1.4 million Palestinians are trapped.
UN humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths cautioned Tuesday that any military operation there "could lead to a slaughter".
Peeperkorn agreed, warning that "military activities in... these densely populated areas would be of course an unfathomable catastrophe".
It "would even further expand the humanitarian disaster beyond imagination". — AFP
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