84% of health facilities in the Gaza Strip have been demolished completely or too severely damaged to continue operations, due to Israeli bombardment and attacks over the past four months.
Many of these are free health clinics operated by The United Nations Refugee and Works Agency (UNRWA).
The United Nations Refugee and Works Agency, despite recent Israeli attempts to discredit it, has been the longest-running aid agency operating in Palestine, having been founded by the United Nations in 1949, just one year after the UN partition plan allowed the state of Israel to be constructed on what had been Palestinian land. UNRWA has served over 4,750,000 Palestinian refugees over four generations.
In a post on the “X” platform Friday, UNRWA published footage showing the destruction of civilian infrastructure in the Strip, including many of its health centers.
UNRWA noted that in addition to the damage to health care facilities, more than 70% of all civilian infrastructure had been “destroyed or severely damaged,” and stressed that “no place is safe”.
This most recent assessment comes as the Middle East Eye released a report about an Israeli game in Tel Aviv which mocks the Israeli assaults on hospitals and encourages players to “disguise themselves as Palestinians and make their way to a set that emulates Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital.
“In a fictional version of the hospital’s emergency room, the players use pretend guns to shoot at fake Palestinian fighters attacking them through the windows.
“From there, the players must enter a tunnel below the mock al-Shifa, where their mission is to neutralise a chemical bomb bound for Tel Aviv.
“‘Fauda: Explosive Lab’ is an “escape room” in Tel Aviv, Israel, based on the controversial Israeli Netflix show Fauda. Participants in the game pay to pretend to be Israeli agents sent to Gaza.”
This mockery is especially disturbing given Israel’s actual assault on Al-Shifa Hospital, which crippled Gaza’s largest health facility while revealing none of the claimed ‘tunnels’ and ‘Hamas headquarters’ that had been Israel’s justification for the assault at the time.
In November, when the attack on al-Shifa took place (and since then, there have been dozens of additional assaults on hospitals, including Friday’s invasion of al-Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis), the chief of the World Health Organization was unequivocal: “The world cannot stand silent while hospitals, which should be safe havens, are transformed into scenes of death, devastation, and despair.”
In the three months since, although the world has not entirely stood silent, Israeli attacks on hospitals have continued unabated with no repercussions.
