GENEVA: The World Health Organization said on Tuesday a large-scale medical evacuation was planned from Gaza this week, with more than 100 seriously ill and injured patients due to leave the war-ravaged territory. The WHO said that alongside its partners it would evacuate as many as 113 patients, with most going to the United Arab Emirates and some heading to Romania for specialised care. If it goes ahead, it would be the largest evacuation from Gaza since October 2023, according to data from the UN health agency.
Rik Peeperkorn, the WHO's representative in the Palestinian territories, said he was hopeful the evacuation would go ahead. He said efforts were currently under way to bring patients from various hospitals across the Gaza Strip to the Gaza European Hospital near Khan Yunis in the south. They will be transported to the Kerem Shalom crossing and then flown on to the UAE and Romania, Peeperkorn told reporters in Geneva, via video link from Gaza.
Since the war in Gaza began following October 7, 2023 attack inside Israel, fewer than 5,000 people have been granted medical evacuations out of the territory. Only 282 have meanwhile been able to leave since Israel shuttered Gaza's main Rafah border crossing in early May, Peeperkorn said, adding that around a third of them had been children. Peeperkorn lamented the "ad hoc" access to desperately-needed medical evacuations from Gaza.
"What we need is regular access... which would be properly supported, facilitated and not made unnecessarily dangerous," he said. "We need medical corridors, and the first medical corridor we basically request to be restored is the traditional referral pathway from Gaza to East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and... a second medical corridor to Egypt should be open again, and maybe to Jordan."
Meanwhile, Gaza civil defence agency said on Tuesday that at least 13 people, including some living in tents for displaced Palestinians, were killed in Israeli air strikes overnight. Four people were killed when an Israeli missile hit the home of the Shurafa family in eastern Gaza City, civil defence spokesman Mahmud Bassal said. Three people were killed and several wounded when a tent housing Palestinians displaced by the war was hit by an Israeli missile in the east of Khan Yunis city, Bassal said. Another tent housing displaced people in Deir el-Balah in central Gaza was also hit by an Israeli air strike overnight, killing at least four people, he added. Two other people were killed in separate incidents, Bassal said. Israel's retaliatory campaign has killed 43,391 people in Gaza, most of them civilians, according to Gaza health ministry figures which the United Nations considers to be reliable. — AFP
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