TEL AVIV, Israel — Doctors Without Borders has suspended operations in Gaza City because of the danger to its staff caused by the Israeli military’s ground offensive, the latest sign of the growing pressures on medical care in the Gaza Strip.
The organization, which provides medical care, including treatment for malnutrition and severe trauma injuries, said Friday that it had stopped activities in Gaza City and that Israeli tanks and military strikes had advanced within roughly a half mile of the group’s clinics there.
“We have been left with no choice but to stop our activities, as our clinics are encircled by Israeli forces,” Jacob Granger, the emergency medical coordinator in Gaza for Doctors Without Borders, said in a statement. “This is the last thing we wanted, as the needs in Gaza City are enormous.”
He added that in the last week alone, the organization’s clinic had provided more than 3,600 consultations and treated over 1,600 people suffering from malnutrition.
The charity made the announcement on the same day that the United Nations said four hospitals had been rendered unusable in the north of the territory over the past month. The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Tarik Jasarevic, a spokesperson for the World Health Organization, told reporters in Geneva on Friday that more hospitals in Gaza might have to suspend operations in the coming days because of a lack of supplies.
Gaza’s medical system has been further devastated since Israel launched its full-scale ground offensive on Gaza City, which it says is one of the last Hamas strongholds in the territory, on Sept. 16.
Israel issued an evacuation order for the city before the offensive began. But Granger said that many of the most vulnerable people, including “infants in neonatal care, those with severe injuries and life-threatening illnesses,” were unable to leave.
The closures have left just 14 hospitals operating in all of Gaza, the United Nations said, where 2.2 million people have endured almost two years of unrelenting war ignited by a Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. The Gaza Health Ministry, whose tally does not distinguish between combatants and civilians, said Saturday that 77 people had been killed in the past 24 hours.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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