Stray dogs eating bodies of dead Gazans in Al-Shifa Hospital

Stray dogs have been eating the bodies of dead Palestinians which have piled up in the courtyards of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, the Palestinian Authority Minister of Health Mai Al-Kaila said yesterday.

Al-Kaila said the Israeli occupation army is not evacuating “hospitals, but rather throws the wounded and sick into the street to certain death, which is not an ‘evacuation’ but an expulsion at gunpoint.”

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Middle East Monitor (@middleeastmonitor)

“There is a disaster happening in [Gaza] hospitals where patients are now dying without receiving their treatments, such as children and adult dialysis patients who die in their homes without receiving dialysis sessions.”

According to the minister, as many as 12 patients have died so far inside Al-Shifa Medical Complex, due to the outage of electricity and medical supplies. The death toll includes two new-born children.

“All 3,000 oncology patients who were being treated in Al-Rantisi and Al-Turki Hospital are now being left to die, after the [Israeli] occupation expelled them from the hospitals,” the statement said, noting that “all pregnant women and women with high risk pregnancies are at higher risk, as they cannot find anyone to provide them with treatment and medical services in Gaza. Every woman who is about to give birth will not find anyone to provide her with any medical service.”

“The sick and wounded cannot reach Al-Shifa Medical Complex, and many of them have lost their lives… Meanwhile, the medical staff inside Al-Shifa Hospital cannot move between the medical complex’s departments and buildings, as an Israeli drone fires at everyone who moves inside the complex,” the statement added.

Read: Israeli air strike targets Gaza civil defense team

“Another danger that threatens the lives of patients and the onset of a health catastrophe, is the medical teams’ inability to bury 100 martyrs whose bodies began to decompose in the hospital courtyard, and where stray dogs mauled some of them, according to the testimony of the medical staff present there, in addition to the medical waste accumulated inside the departments.”

“Patients are injured again while receiving treatment in Al-Shifa as a result of the [Israeli] occupation’s bombing of the medical complex, which affected water wells, oxygen stations, the complex’s gate and other facilities, while the [donated] blood stock inside the departments had been spoiled due to a power outage, and medical teams can no longer give blood units to the sick and wounded who are bleeding.”

The Palestinian minister pointed out that the wounded, sick and medical teams can’t find anything to eat and water supplies have been cut off from the complex.

She stressed that “the solution now is to supply the medical complex with electricity, medical supplies, medicines and fuel, or to safely evacuate patients for treatment in the Arab Republic of Egypt, as the hospitals in the Strip are no longer able to receive more wounded.”