The health crisis in Gaza is no longer a crisis that can be dealt with by first aid or crisis management. What is happening today exceeds the human body’s capacity to endure and challenges the most basic remnants of human dignity. Here, in this besieged strip of land, Gaza patients have all received a death sentence.

In hospitals that are barely standing on their ruins, patients wither away before their doctors’ eyes, without treatment, equipment or even a dose of painkillers, as if they were living through chapters of a slow death silently written for them. Despite the world’s talk of a ceasefire, the reality is that the extermination continues, but with more subtle and cruel means.

Gaza patients tragedy

World Health Organization reports reveal a tragedy that transcends language: 15,600 patients are awaiting medical evacuation, including 4,000 children whose lives are slipping away moment by moment due to lack of care. More than 900 patients have died while stuck between hope and closed borders—they died because a permit was not issued, because the world did not act.

In the background, there are cancer patients—about 10,000 people—whose treatments have been interrupted, their lives halted as their medical equipment has. As for kidney patients, the chaos has claimed the lives of nearly 650 of them, in a series of tragedies that the dilapidated health sector cannot break.

Doctors describe the situation in shocking terms: “ongoing health genocide.” More than 56% of essential medicines are unavailable, and hospitals lack equipment, power, and safe environments for treatment. The human stories speak louder than the numbers: children with amputated limbs without care, cancer patients suffering in silence, and others dragging their frail bodies to intermittent dialysis sessions, not knowing if they will be enough to extend their lives for another day.

All this can only be described by its true name: slow murder and deprivation of the right to life. The patients who die at the gates of the crossings, in queues, and in dark medical corridors are not statistics in reports; they are faces, names, and stories that were not given a chance to survive.

Unless safe routes to treatment are opened and hospitals are brought back to life, Gaza patients will continue to die—with a quietness that resembles the world’s silence, and with a cruelty that no human body can bear.

Featured image via UN News

By Alaa Shamali

This post was originally published on Canary.