The UN World Health Organization calls on Israel to release the head of the Gaza hospital as the death toll exceeds 45,500

Geneva — The head of the United Nations World Health Organization called on Monday for the immediate release of Hossam Abu Safiyeh, the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in the war-torn Gaza Strip held by the Israeli army after a major attack on the object. The attack on Kamal Adwan in Beit Lahia on Friday and Saturday left the last major health facility in northern Gaza out of service and emptied of patients, the WHO said.

“Hospitals in Gaza have once again become battlefields and the healthcare system is seriously threatened“, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus he said on X. “The Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza is out of service following a raid, the forced evacuation of patients and staff, and the detention of its director. His whereabouts are unknown. We call for his immediate release.”

Israel’s military said Sunday that its forces had killed approximately 20 Palestinian militants and arrested “240 terrorists” in the raid, calling it one of its “largest operations” conducted in the territory. The Israeli military said it arrested Abu Safiyeh, suspecting him to be a Hamas militant. The army did not immediately comment on whether he had been transferred to Israeli territory for further questioning.

Israeli officials consistently accuse Hamas of using civilians as human shields, placing its weapons and fighters in and under hospitals, schools and other vital infrastructure. The group, long designated a terrorist organization by Israel and the US, has denied the accusations.

Tedros said patients in critical condition in Kamal Adwan were transferred to an Indonesian hospital, also in northern Gaza, “which itself is not functioning”.

“Amid the ongoing chaos in northern Gaza, WHO and partners today delivered basic medical and hygiene supplies, food and water to an Indonesian hospital and transferred 10 critical patients to Al-Shifa Hospital,” he said. “We ask Israel to ensure that their health needs and rights are respected.”

He said seven patients along with 15 caregivers and health workers remained in a “severely damaged” Indonesian hospital, “which has no capacity to provide care.”

“Al-Ahli Hospital and Al-Wafa Rehabilitation Hospital in Gaza City also faced attacks today and both were damaged,” Tedros added. “We repeat: stop the attacks on hospitals. The people of Gaza need access to health care. Humanitarians need access to provide health care.”

A charity based in London Amnesty International also called on Israel to release Abu Safiyeh immediately and unconditionally, saying in a series of social media posts that the hospital director had become “the voice of Gaza’s decimated health sector.”

benevolence he accused The Israeli military for genocide against Palestinians in Gaza — a charge Israel has repeated and vehemently denied — and accused the Israeli military of detaining “hundreds of Palestinian health workers” without charge and subjecting them to “torture and other ill-treatment.”

Since October 6 this year, Israel’s operations in Gaza have focused on the north, with officials saying their ground and air offensive is aimed at preventing Hamas from regrouping.

Health officials in the Hamas-ruled Palestinian territory said Monday that the total death toll in Gaza since the Israeli offensive had risen to 45,541, including 27 people the Health Ministry said were killed in the past 24 hours alone.

The ministry said at least 108,338 others have been wounded since Israel launched its offensive against Hamas. The war was launched in response to a Hamas terrorist attack on October 7, 2023, in which militants killed around 1,200 people in Israel and kidnapped 251 people.

Cold winter temperatures have worsened the misery of Palestinians in Gaza after more than a year of war. Doctors in the enclave have reported in recent weeks that infants have died of hypothermia.

dr. Fidda Al-Nadi, a doctor at Nasser Hospital in the southern city of Khan Younis, which has not been fully functional since Israeli attacks earlier this year, told CBS News last week that she receives one or two cases of hypothermia each time. day, and that the youngest patients were the most vulnerable.

“In the stress we live in, many children are born prematurely, and this predisposes them more to hypothermia,” Al-Nadi said.