12-07-2025
Gaza doctors cram babies into incubators amid fuel shortages
Gaza hospitals fear dwindling fuel supplies will lead to shutdowns
GAZA: At Gaza's largest hospital, doctors say crippling fuel shortages have led them to put several premature babies in a single incubator as they struggle to keep the newborns alive while the Zionist entity presses on with its military campaign. Overwhelmed medics say the dwindling fuel supplies threaten to plunge them into darkness and paralyses hospitals and clinics in the Palestinian territory, where health services have been pummeled during 21 months of war. While Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu discussed the fate of Zionist hostages in Gaza with US President Donald Trump in Washington this week, patients at Al-Shifa medical center in Gaza City faced imminent danger, doctors there said.
'We are forced to place four, five, or sometimes three premature babies in one incubator,' said Dr. Mohammed Abu Selmia, Al Shifa's director. 'Premature babies are now in a very critical condition.' The threat comes from 'neither an airstrike nor a missile — but a siege choking the entry of fuel,' Dr. Muneer Alboursh, director general of the Gaza Ministry of Health, told Reuters.
The shortage is 'depriving these vulnerable people of their basic right to medical care, turning the hospital into a silent graveyard,' he said. Gaza, a tiny strip of land with a population of more than 2 million, was under a long, the Zionist-led blockade before the war between the Zionist entity and Palestinian militant group Hamas erupted. Palestinians and medical workers have accused the Zionist military of attacking hospitals, allegations it rejects.
The Zionist entity accuses Hamas of operating from medical facilities and running command centers underneath them, which Hamas denies. Patients in need of medical care, food and water are paying the price. There have been more than 600 attacks on health facilities since the conflict began, the WHO says, without attributing blame. It has described the health sector in Gaza as being 'on its knees', with shortages of fuel, medical supplies and frequent arrivals of mass casualties.
Just half of Gaza's 36 general hospitals are partially functioning, according to the UN agency. Abu Selmia warned of a humanitarian catastrophe and accused the Zionist entity of 'trickle-feeding' fuel to Gaza's hospitals. COGAT, the Zionist military aid coordination agency, did not immediately respond to a request for comment about fuel shortages at Gaza's medical facilities and the risk to patients.
Oxygen risk
Abu Selmia said Al Shifa's dialysis department had been shut down to protect the intensive care unit and operating rooms, which can't be without electricity for even a few minutes. There are around 100 premature babies in Gaza City hospitals whose lives are at serious risk, he said. Before the war, there were 110 incubators in northern Gaza compared to about 40 now, said Abu Selmia.
'Oxygen stations will stop working. A hospital without oxygen is no longer a hospital. The lab and blood banks will shut down, and the blood units in the refrigerators will spoil,' Abu Selmia said, adding that the hospital could become 'a graveyard for those inside'.
Officials at Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis are also wondering how they will cope with the fuel crisis. The hospital needs 4,500 liters of fuel per day and it now has only 3,000 liters, said hospital spokesperson Mohammed Sakr. Doctors are performing surgeries without electricity or air conditioning. The sweat from staff is dripping into patients' wounds, he said.
Earlier this year, the Zionist entity imposed a total blockade on Gaza for nearly three months, before partly lifting it. The Zionist entity accuses Hamas of diverting aid, something Hamas denies. 'You can have the best hospital staff on the planet, but if they are denied the medicines and the pain killers and now the very means for a hospital to have light ... it becomes an impossibility,' said James Elder, a spokesperson for UN children's agency UNICEF, recently returned from Gaza. — Reuters
