Hospitals In Besieged Gaza ‘at Near-total Collapse’, Staff Overwhelmed

Exhausted UN aid workers in Gaza on Thursday continued to report a lack of food across the war-devastated enclave, while medical teams warned that hospitals are overwhelmed by a daily influx of injured people and close to “near-total collapse”

UNITED NATIONS, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 7th Aug, 2025) Exhausted UN aid workers in Gaza on Thursday continued to report a lack of food across the war-devastated enclave, while medical teams warned that hospitals are overwhelmed by a daily influx of injured people and close to “near-total collapse”.

Meanwhile, UN agencies confirmed the deaths of three Palestinians from Guillain-Barre Syndrome (GBS), a rare auto-immune disease that can cause sudden muscle weakness and even paralysis.

Before war erupted in Gaza in October 2023, only a handful of cases surfaced every year.

“Hospitals are overwhelmed by mass casualty incidents, with an average of eight incidents per day,” said the UN aid coordination agency, OCHA, citing health partners.

In an update on the dire health crisis in Gaza, OCHA noted that specialised rehabilitation facilities were also overstretched handling complex trauma injuries and cases of Guillain-Barre.

To date, three deaths out of around 64 cases of GBS have been confirmed by the health authorities in Gaza. Two of the deceased were children.

According to the UN World Health Organization (WHO), 30 per cent of GBS patients require intensive care but there is no available stock of the Primary medication needed to treat it, intravenous immunoglobulin.

In a related development, the UN World Food Programme (WFP) echoed repeated calls for aid to flood into Gaza, as opposed to the very limited amounts being allowed by the Israeli authorities.

“We can’t airdrop our way out of an unfolding famine. Not in Gaza,” emphasized Cindy McCain, WFP Executive Director in a social media post late Wednesday.

The UN agency chief underscored that “500,000 people are starving today” and the only way to help them is to get food to them at scale and by land.

“We can’t afford to wait; Gaza is out of food and out of time,” Ms. McCain said.

The destruction of WHO’s main medical warehouse in an attack on Deir Al-Balah late last month continues to impact lifesaving care.

In particular, the critical shortage of antibiotics has hampered treatment of meningitis, whose numbers are now in the hundreds – “the highest number recorded since the beginning of the escalation”, the OCHA update noted.

Isolation measures have been implemented, including the separation of the external department at Al Khair Hospital from the Nasser Medical Complex and the establishment of isolation tents at Al Aqsa Hospital to safely manage suspected cases.

Explosive weapons such as bombs and grenades have accounted for 83 per cent of medical consultations, said OCHA.

It cited partner NGO Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) whose data covered more than 200,000 medical consultations in six MSF-supported health facilities in Gaza in 2024.

Guillain-Barre Syndrome (GBS) is a neurological and autoimmune disease that affects the nervous system and causes progressive muscle paralysis, it was pointed out, and that it is not contagious and is often triggered by a prior infection – viral or bacterial – that disrupts the immune system.

In most cases, patients can recover fully within a few weeks. But WHO stressed that even in the best healthcare settings, three to five per cent of patients die from complications of the disease, such as respiratory muscle paralysis, sepsis, pulmonary embolism, or cardiac arrest.

There have been several outbreaks of infectious diseases in Gaza since the war erupted in Oct 2023, including polio, cholera, hepatitis A and scabies.