Khaberni - The Gaza Center for Human Rights said that ten thousand Palestinian citizens have died due to being deprived of treatment in the Gaza Strip, due to genocide and targeting of the healthcare system, among them a thousand died as a result of being deprived of travel for receiving treatment due to Israeli restrictions over the past 25 months, demanding the international community to urgently intervene to compel Israel to lift its restrictions, open the crossings, and ensure the movement of travel and securing the needs of hospitals in the sector.
The center warned in a statement today, Sunday, that thousands of Palestinian patients in the Gaza Strip live a daily race against time, and their health deteriorates with the collapse of the health system and the unavailability of appropriate devices and treatments, as well as the continued closure of the Rafah crossing and Israeli obstacles that prevent their travel.
The center confirmed that it documented the death of 10,000 patients, including women and children during their treatment journey in the Gaza Strip during the two years of genocide carried out by Israel, which included targeted and systematic destruction of the healthcare system.
It pointed out that among the documented death cases, a thousand patients from the lists of patients who were registered to travel; due to the deterioration of their health condition and the unavailability of suitable treatments for them. As for the rest of the cases, they died due to the unavailability of treatment resources and the destruction of medical devices, laboratories, and medicines in the sector.
The Gaza Center demanded the international community and the World Health Organization not to accept the current system of health evacuation operations, which make Israel the controller of the process, where the transfer request goes through a complex series of procedures that end with Israeli rejection or delayed response while the bodies of patients deteriorate due to the unavailability of appropriate treatment in the Gaza Strip.
It mentioned that there are still 16500 patients waiting to obtain approval, among them four thousand children who need immediate transfer to save their lives, while thousands of others await the necessary medical transfers.
The Gaza Human Rights Center mentioned that it collected data on more than a thousand cases of patients deprived of travel, including cancer patients whose tumors deteriorated due to the discontinuation of radiation treatment, and those with severe injuries who lost limbs because medical transfers did not arrive in time, and children waiting for transplant operations that cannot be performed inside Gaza after the destruction of most specialized departments.
It clarified that the center's teams follow clear cases that illustrate the catastrophe, including a six-year-old child suffering from advanced muscular atrophy who needs urgent transfer to implant a respiratory device, and a forty-year-old woman suffering from breast cancer whose treatment was delayed for more than ten months until her chances of recovery dwindled, and a young man who suffered a spinal cord tear during one of the raids awaiting a medical evacuation decision for eight months despite doctors’ warnings of the possibility of complete paralysis.
The human rights center emphasized that these cases are a small part of a wider scene that deprives Gaza’s citizens of their basic right to treatment, where the destruction or bombing of most hospitals and the killing of a large number of medical staff and the arrest of others weaken the ability to provide health services especially with the damage to most specialized medical devices.
The coordinator of the center's work, lawyer Mohammed Al-Khairi, said that the occupation practices a blatant medical blockade policy that constitutes collective punishment against patients.
He stressed that any delay in transferring critical cases represents a direct death sentence, especially since the health system has been destroyed over two years of genocide, where hospitals were out of service, and accessing treatment outside Gaza became an impossible operation.
The human rights center demanded a real international intervention to restore patients' right to life, including opening stable and safe corridors for medical evacuation without security restrictions, and securing the transfer of critical cases within hours through an independent international mechanism.
It demanded accountability for Israel for using medical blockade as a systematic killing tool, in the context of the genocide crime it commits.
It also demanded urgent support for the few hospitals and health centers still providing the minimum level of care.
