Gaza medical supplies face 74-day clearance, WHO says

Medical supplies for Gaza face long clearance delays through Israel, with large volumes waiting a median of 74 days, a World Health Organization official said Friday.

Reinhilde Van de Weerdt, the WHO's representative in the Palestinian territories, said the health situation in Gaza remained dire and none of its hospitals was fully functional.

She said not enough humanitarian aid was entering Gaza to allow a meaningful expansion and restoration of health services. She described Israel's approval system for medical and other humanitarian supplies as a major bottleneck.

Van de Weerdt said the process was labour-intensive, time-consuming and had no guaranteed outcome. She said that if supplies were not cleared, the process had to start again.

She said standard health kits used worldwide had the lowest approval rate, while X-ray machines, sterilisation equipment and spare parts for CT scans and other essential machines were rejected regularly. She said one shipment of prosthetics and assistive devices had been rejected four times in the past six months.

Medicines moved more easily, she said, with almost 87 percent approved and one percent rejected.

Israel says it is preventing the entry of items that could also have military use. It accuses Hamas, which carried out the October 7, 2023, attack against Israel, of plotting further violence.

Van de Weerdt called for more crossings into Gaza to be opened and for clear, published guidance on the approval process. She said the number of trucks crossing the border was not enough to show whether health needs were being met.

The Gaza war was sparked by the Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, which killed 1,221 people, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures. Israel's offensive in Gaza has killed more than 74,000 people, according to Gaza's health ministry, whose figures the United Nations considers reliable.