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Director-General of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said on Wednesday that the destruction of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza will require more medical evacuations and will ultimately lead to more deaths if the evacuation is not carried out quickly.

Israeli forces left the hospital the day before yesterday, Monday, after a two-week operation during which they arrested hundreds of suspected Palestinian militants and left behind destroyed buildings over large areas.

“The number of people needing medical evacuation will increase, and medical evacuation is already slow,” Ghebreyesus said.

He added: "People will die because they will not receive services, whether from recovery or because of the slow evacuation, because they cannot be evacuated."

Ghebreyesus stressed: “The evacuation process must be accelerated... otherwise we will lose a lot of people. We will lose a lot of lives.”

Richard Peppercorn, the World Health Organization's representative in the occupied Palestinian territories, said that the destruction of Al-Shifa Hospital would leave "thousands without health care."

Health care in Gaza is inadequate

He stressed the need to somehow transfer patients to other facilities providing health care in the northern Gaza Strip, which are already struggling to continue operating.

He added: "We must realize that the health care provided in Gaza is completely inadequate... It is a health system on its knees, as we have repeatedly said... It is insufficient. It is incomplete."

Ghebreyesus stated that only 10 of Gaza's 36 hospitals are still able to operate, even partially.

He added that the World Health Organization is seeking to visit the destroyed hospital to talk to the staff and find out what can be saved, but he went on to say that the situation on the ground appears to be "catastrophic."

Al-Shifa Medical Complex, the largest hospital in Gaza before the war, with 750 beds and numerous operating rooms, was one of the few partially functioning health care facilities in northern Gaza before the raid.

The siege lasted two weeks

The Israeli occupation army withdrew at dawn on Monday from inside the Al-Shifa Medical Complex and its surroundings, west of Gaza City, after a two-week storming and siege operation, while hundreds of bodies were found inside the complex and in the surrounding area.

The occupation forces headed south, where they had a camp where tanks and bulldozers were stationed, in the area between the Sheikh Ajlin and Tal Al-Hawa neighborhoods.

According to what Al Jazeera’s correspondent reported from eyewitnesses, the withdrawal was sudden, and coincided with gunfire and the firing of tank shells towards residential buildings in the vicinity of the medical complex.

The withdrawal comes after an Israeli attack on the complex and its surroundings for two weeks, which led to the death, injury, and arrest of hundreds of Palestinians.

Israeli Army Radio said that the army killed 200, arrested 500 others, and detained about 900 for investigation during its operation in the medical complex and its surroundings.

Source: Al Jazeera + Reuters