Gaza UN shelters run out of water

Water has run out at UN shelters across Gaza as thousands packed into the courtyard of the besieged territory’s largest hospital as a refuge of last resort from a looming Israeli ground offensive and overwhelmed doctors struggled to care for patients they fear will die once generators run out of fuel.

Israel has cut off the flow of food, medicine, water and electricity to Gaza, pounded neighbourhoods with airstrikes and told the estimated 1 million residents of the north to flee south ahead of Israel’s planned attack.

About half a million Gaza residents have taken refuge in UN shelters across the territory and are running out of water, said Juliette Touma, a spokesperson for the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency, known by the acronym UNRWA. “Gaza is running dry,” she said, adding that UN teams have also begun to ration water.

Across Gaza, families rationed dwindling water supplies, with many forced to drink dirty or brackish water. Relief groups called for the protection of the over 2 million civilians in Gaza urging an emergency corridor be established for the transfer of humanitarian aid.

Doctors in the evacuation zone said they couldn’t relocate their patients safely, so they decided to stay as well to care for them.

“We shall not evacuate the hospital even if it costs us our lives,” said Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, the head of paediatrics at Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia. If they left, the seven newborns in the intensive care unit would die, he said. And even if they could move them, there is nowhere for them to go in the 40-km-long coastal territory.

Other doctors feared for the lives of patients dependent on ventilators and those suffering from complex blast wounds needing around-the-clock care. Doctors worried entire hospital facilities would be shut down and many would die as the last of fuel stocks powering their generators came close to running out. UN humanitarian monitors estimated this could happen by Monday. (AP)