By Sumayya
Getting medical help through Israel into Gaza is filled with “one slow check after another,” the World Health Organization (WHO) stated Friday, as it spoke out against the deep lack of health supplies.
Reinhilde Van de Weerdt, the WHO’s main officer in the Palestinian areas, noted that the medical state in the Gaza Strip “stays completely terrible,” with not a single clinic working fully.
“Not nearly enough medical help is getting into Gaza, and certainly not enough to let us grow or bring back basic health services,” she informed reporters in Geneva, speaking from Jerusalem.
She noted that Israel’s clearance network for medical and other relief goods was acting as a massive roadblock.
“It takes a lot of hard work, wastes a lot of time, and has no sure outcomes,” she stated.
Based on the WHO’s newest review, huge piles of health goods have to wait for permission for an average of 74 days, noted Van de Weerdt, adding that if it fails to pass, “then we have to start that long, heavy loop all over again.”
She supplemented that the clearance network kept shifting, with fresh rules frequently brought in.
Israel states it is blocking the entry of goods that could also be deployed for army usage as it blames Hamas — which led the worst-ever attack against Israel on October 7, 2023 — of planning extra fighting.
‘Let the help in’
Van de Weerdt noted that basic medical boxes used all over the planet had the worst clearance rate, while X-ray tools, cleaning gear and extra parts for CT scanners and other vital tools “face constant rejections.”
“In merely the past six months by itself, a single delivery of artificial limbs and walking aids faced rejections four different times,” she stated.
Even so, pharmacy drugs pass “fairly smoothly,” with close to 87 percent cleared and only one percent turned down, she supplemented.
“It is not a single roadblock. It is an entire network, filled with one slow wait after another… and at the end of each of these waits is a sick person who is hoping for help,” she stated.
“We must have the free and steady entry of relief and medical goods into Gaza, in massive amounts.
“We wish that Israel will at minimum ease the heavy block on medical goods.”
Van de Weerdt asked for extra border pathways into the land to be opened up, and for “plain, public instructions” on rules and paperwork.
She supplemented that winning should not be judged by the total count of cargo trucks passing the border line, arguing that this tells “nearly nothing about whether the true medical needs of the people are being answered.”
“A cargo truck filled with low-priority goods, or the correct items getting there way too late, fails to save lives.”
The Gaza fighting was started by Hamas’s historic 2023 strike against Israel, which caused the deaths of 1,221 individuals, based on an AFP count using official Israeli data.
The giant Israeli military attack in return has left the bulk of Gaza destroyed and killed more than 74,000 individuals, based on Gaza’s medical ministry, which runs under Hamas control and whose numbers are viewed as correct by the United Nations.
