Turkey’s Red Crescent sends 8.5 tons of medicine to Gaza

A delegation from the Turkish Red Crescent Society (IFRC) yesterday arrived in the occupied Gaza Strip, with the aim to provide medical assistance and to inspect projects funded recently by the organisation, Anadolu Agency has reported.

The delegation included IFRC’s president, Karam Kannik, as well as two other members of the organisation.

“The delegation visited Gaza’s Al-Amal orphanage to provide food aid and clothing for orphans,” Kannik told the agency.

IFRC, he added, would renovate and rehabilitate one of the orphanage’s buildings “to accommodate more orphans.”

“IFRC recently funded the construction of two floors at the orphanage [Al-Amal] and will continue to support it,” the official pointed out.

Kannik noted that the convoy inspected an IFRC-funded logistics building, which he said was being constructed for the Palestinian Red Crescent office in Gaza.

The Turkish delegation is due to hold meetings with the enclave’s health authorities.

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Earlier on Sunday, IFRC sent a shipment of medical supplies to Gaza from the Palestinian health ministry’s warehouses in the West Bank city of Nablus.

“Gaza hospitals are in a deep need of medicine and medical supplies,” Kannik said, stressing that the Israeli siege “has negatively affected the enclave’s facilities especially the health sector.”

“Turkey will continue to support the Palestinian health sector,” he reiterated.

The Palestinian health ministry said earlier that the IFRC dispatched shipment consisted of medical supplies worth $274,000.

In May, Turkish IFRC sent medical supplies worth some $100,000 to its office in the besieged Gaza.

Gaza continues to groan under a decade-long Israeli blockade that has gutted the territory’s economy and deprived its two million inhabitants of many basic commodities, including food, fuel and medicine. The health ministry recently warned of “imminent collapse of the enclave’s health sector due to a severe shortage in medicine and medical supplies.”