Gaza City offensive: A death sentence for one million Palestinians
Gaza City is facing a humanitarian catastrophe as Israel’s latest military assault escalates, pushing people to the brink and threatening the survival of what remains of the healthcare system.
Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders (MSF) teams warn that it will be simply impossible to force one million people – including hundreds of critically ill patients and newborn babies – out of Gaza City and into overcrowded and under-resourced areas in the centre and south of the Strip.
This would represent a death sentence for one million Palestinians.
Relentless bombing by the Israeli forces and the advance of the ground offensive are killing hundreds of Palestinians and driving them from their homes and shelters, sometimes multiple times. This follows a pattern of complete destruction previously witnessed by MSF teams in Rafah, in the south of the Gaza Strip.
“Some of our colleagues have been displaced more than eleven times since 2023,” says Jacob Granger, Emergency coordinator for MSF in Gaza.
Makeshift shelters offer little safety as bombing continues, often targeting areas to which survivors had already fled. An estimated one million displaced persons now occupy just 15 percent of Gaza’s territory, with conditions worsened by the destruction of almost 90 percent of water and sanitation systems.
“MSF continues to distribute water in the city but, with no water reserves left, if the Israeli forces make drinkable water production and distribution impossible, people will die in a matter of days”, says Granger.
Outbreaks of disease such as acute diarrhoea are already spreading in overcrowded, unsanitary living conditions.
A healthcare system on the brink
Israel’s offensive is deliberately wrecking Gaza’s healthcare capacity.
More than half of the hospitals have been rendered inoperative; those remaining function on the brink of collapse under targeted attacks.
Bed occupancy rates reached 300 percent at Al Ahli Hospital, 240 percent at Shifa Hospital and 210 percent at Rantissi Hospital.
The ongoing escalation in Gaza City is threatening to close 11 of 18 partially functioning hospitals in the Gaza Strip, as well as other healthcare facilities. Meanwhile, the health authorities report zero stock remaining for over half of essential drugs.
Medical staff have endured repeated raids, health workers themselves have been killed, detained or threatened, including an MSF doctor still in detention with no formal charges against him.
In the medical facilities we support in Gaza City, we are seeing an increased number of wounded people with increasingly serious injuries. However, patients who need intensive care are at risk of dying if forced to evacuate due to hospital closures. People with disabilities, people who are sick or wounded will not be able to evacuate.
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Starvation as a policy
The siege has triggered a famine: restrictions on food, clean water, medicine, and aid deliveries are causing acute malnutrition rates to skyrocket.
Civilians desperate for aid at distribution points face deadly force. For months, MSF clinics responded to mass casualties resulting from Israeli fire at the food distribution sites managed by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) – the Israeli-US-backed body that has militarised aid distribution.
Israel's ground operations must stop immediately
Israeli forces aim to push Palestinians out of Gaza City through genocide, ethnic cleansing and creating impossible life conditions.
Nowhere is safe, and the vastly insufficient quantities of aid are being delivered through routes that are extremely dangerous for civilians. All the while, the destruction of critical infrastructure is ongoing and deliberate.
MSF calls for:
The immediate end to the use of evacuation orders as a means of forcible displacement, a lasting ceasefire, and the entry of humanitarian aid at scale.
We ask for the protection of medical facilities and the coordinated movements of humanitarian organisations.
The systematic destruction of an entire city and population must end.
We call on Israel’s allies to stop arms transfers to Israel immediately and ramp up the pressure to halt the offensive.
Without urgent, radical intervention, Gaza faces total annihilation.
MSF and the Gaza genocide
An unprecedented humanitarian crisis is unfolding in Gaza. MSF is clear: We are witnessing Israel commit genocide.
MSF teams are seeing firsthand the campaign of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians being pursued by the Israeli military in Gaza. The UK Government is complicit in these atrocities.
Our teams have worked to treat the wounded and supply overwhelmed hospitals as indiscriminate attacks and a state of siege threaten millions of men, women and children.