JERUSALEM (dpa-AFX) - World Health Organization teams have undertaken high-risk missions to deliver supplies, with partners, to hospitals in Northern and Southern Gaza.
The teams, consisting of officials from WHO and UNICEF, witnessed intense hostilities, high patient loads and overcrowding caused by people displaced by the conflict seeking refuge.
The teams visited two hospitals - Al-Shifa in the north and Al-Amal Palestine Red Crescent Society in the south - to deliver supplies and assess needs on the ground.
Both hospitals also serve as shelters for displaced people seeking relative safety. At Al-Shifa Hospital, a reported 50000 people are sheltering, while in Al-Amal there are 14000.
According to the latest WHO assessments, Gaza has 13 partially functioning hospitals, 2 minimally functioning ones, and 21 that are not functioning at all.
WHO staff also reported Tuesday that the need for food continues to be acute across the Gaza Strip.
While transiting across Gaza, WHO staff witnessed tens of thousands of people fleeing heavy strikes in the Khan Younis and Middle Area, on foot, riding on donkeys, or in cars. Make-shift shelters were being built along the road,' the UN health agency said in a press release .
WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus repeated his call on the international community to take urgent steps to alleviate the grave peril facing the population of Gaza and jeopardizing the ability of humanitarian workers to help people with terrible injuries, acute hunger, and at severe risk of disease.
Thousands of families in the thickly populated Palestinian enclave are seeking shelter as they flee bombing after Israel broadened its ground offensive across central and southern Gaza.
More than 21100 Palestinians were killed in Israeli raids in Gaza in retaliation for Hamas' October 7 terror attacks on communities in southern Israel, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.
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