On Tuesday, Israel sent ground troops and tanks into the city of Rafah and seized the nearby crossing into Egypt, which is the main conduit for aid to the defeated Palestinian territory.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said fuel that the United Nations health agency had hoped would be allowed on Wednesday had been blocked.
Israeli authorities control the flow of humanitarian aid to Gaza.
“The closure of the border crossing continues to prevent the UN from bringing fuel. Without fuel, all humanitarian operations will stop. Border closures are also preventing the delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza,” Tedros wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
“Hospitals in southern Gaza only have three days of fuel left, meaning services could soon be disrupted.”
Israel has threatened a major assault on Rafah to defeat thousands of Hamas fighters it says are raised there. But the city is also a refuge for more than 1.4 million Palestinians who have fled fighting further north in the coastal enclave under previous evacuation orders from Israel.
They have crowded into tent camps and makeshift shelters and suffered shortages of food, water and medicine. Rafah’s main maternity hospital, where almost half of Gaza’s births take place, has stopped admitting patients, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) told the Reuters news agency.
UNFPA announced that the Al-Helal Al-Emairati maternity hospital had attended about 85 of the 180 births in Gaza each day before Israel’s incursion into the city.
Medical Aid for Palestine (MAP) stated that it had received an update from Marwan Homs, director of the Abu Youssef al-Najjar Hospital in Rafah, who said that the facility is no longer functional because all staff have been ordered to evacuate.
“This was the largest hospital in Rafah,” MAP noted.
“This means that the Rafah health system, which is already overstretched and under-resourced, now only has the Kuwaiti Hospital, which is an NGO hospital with around (a) 16-bed capacity; the Marwani field hospital, which is only a trauma stabilization point; and Al-Emairati Hospital, which is just a maternity hospital,” he added.
The dire warnings come as Palestinian officials in Gaza accused Israel of deliberately stopping aid from entering Gaza and attacking medical facilities.
Israeli forces are “intentionally worsening the humanitarian situation by stopping the entry of aid supplies from the Rafah and Karem Abu Salem border crossings, and attacking hospitals and schools in eastern Rafah,” Salama Marouf, spokesperson for the Gaza Government Media Office, referring to the latter crossing by its Arabic name. It is also known as Kerem Shalom in Hebrew.
Israel says it does not restrict aid to Gaza.
Hamas announced that its fighters were fighting Israeli forces in eastern Rafah. The Israeli military claimed that its troops had discovered Hamas infrastructure in several locations in eastern Rafah and were conducting targeted raids on the Gaza side of the Rafah crossing and airstrikes throughout the Gaza Strip.
Israel has ordered tens of thousands of civilians, many of whom have already been uprooted several times, to an “expanded humanitarian zone” in al-Mawasi, about 20 kilometers (12 miles) away. Rafah Mayor Ahmed Al-Sofi said the coastal area lacked all “the necessities of life.”
Residential neighborhoods, hospitals and schools where tens of thousands of people have sought refuge “are being attacked” by Israeli forces in Rafah, Maarouf said.
“The reality in the eastern governorate of Rafah indicates a true humanitarian catastrophe,” he added.
More than 35 Palestinians have died in the last 24-hour period, according to health officials in the enclave.
Speaking alongside Maarouf, Khalil al-Daghran, a Gaza Health Ministry official, said the closure of the Rafah crossing has prevented dozens of wounded and sick Palestinians from leaving to seek treatment abroad and those who were cleared by Egypt to leave Gaza on Tuesday. They have been prevented from doing so.
The situation for the sick and wounded in Gaza is “very difficult” and has been this way since the beginning of the Israeli attack due to a serious lack of medical supplies, al-Daghran added.
He called on the international community and US President Joe Biden’s administration to pressure Israel to end its attack and reopen border crossings immediately.
Some 50,000 people had left Rafah since Monday, when the Israeli incursion began, an official with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) said.
UNRWA announced that an average of 200 people are leaving Rafah every hour, mainly towards Deir el-Balah in central Gaza and the largely destroyed southern city of Khan Younis.