Dr Mike Ryan: Ceasefire would be 'best medicine for the children of Gaza'
Premature babies at Gaza's Al-Shifa hospital relocated amid ongoing Israeli attacks. Picture: Reuters/Anadolu
A ceasefire would represent “the best medicine for the children of Gaza”, Dr Mike Ryan has said.
Speaking on Monday, the World Health Organization's (WHO) executive director of Health Emergencies Programme described what had been unfolding at Gaza’s Al-Shifa hospital as a “tragedy”.
In a statement, Unicef said the condition of 31 newborn babies evacuated from the hospital over the weekend was “rapidly deteriorating” following the “total collapse” of services there.
Following pleas from health authorities, the babies were transferred, in temperature-controlled incubators and under the supervision of medical staff, to the Al-Helal Al-Emarati Hospital in Rafah in southern Gaza.
Though their condition has stabilised, Unicef said they remained in the neonatal intensive care unit.
Unicef said it and its partners were currently “supporting the identification and registration” of the newborns to help trace and reunify them with their parents and family members, where possible.
Dr Ryan said healthcare workers in Gaza had been using a “very terrible acronym” to describe some young people being treated for injuries and illnesses: WCNSP — ‘wounded child, no surviving parent.'
He said many of the 250 patients remaining at Al-Shifa were very seriously ill and therefore difficult to move.
“And remember here, we have had six weeks of very little food, no water, and very little supplies,” he said.
“We have managed to resupply Al-Shifa twice, but it’s a drop in the ocean.”
Dr Ryan said the hospital had essentially been “put beyond use” as a medical facility, with patients now only able to receive “the barest of care.”
He said the patients needed to be evacuated as soon as possible.
He told a pause in fighting was “absolutely essential for everyone”, given the major public health crisis facing the enclave.
He also said the supplies and relief which had been able to enter Gaza to date only amounted to “a trickle”.
“The access of humanitarian supplies is dependent on a ceasefire, the safety of children is dependent on a ceasefire.”
Dr Ryan said Al-Shifa was a major referral centre which had been “the heartbeat of healthcare in Gaza for 75 years”. He said hospitals in southern Gaza, which had much more simple infrastructures, were now having to deal with three times the population displaced by the conflict.
“We used to have 3,500 hospital beds in Gaza. Now we have less than 1,400 and many of them are struggling to function.”
Speaking on the same programme, former president and United Nations (UN) High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson said it had been difficult to listen to Dr Ryan’s description of the situation on the ground in Gaza.
Ms Robinson, who chairs the Elders, a group of public figures who are senior statesmen, peace activists and human rights advocates, said there was a need for “a vision of peace, for an actual peace plan, and a serious building of new coalition for peace to deliver that plan”.
She said up to now, Israel had been pursuing “a military solution”.
“But there is no military solution, and that is not a way to try to bring about safety either for Israelis or Palestinians. It's very destructive, it's disproportionate.”
Ms Robinson said the US had been backing Israel “too much in the sense of not putting enough conditions" on how Israel would respond to the horrendousness of Hamas.
She said she and her fellow Elders had written an open letter to US president Joe Biden calling for him to do more to bring about lasting peace in the region.
Ms Robinson accused Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing governing coalition of dividing the two most dominant parties in the Palestinian political scene — Hamas and Fatah.
“That was his way of having, as he said, no partner to deal with," she said.
“And in many ways, American governments were complicit in this, and the EU is complicit in this. Not making more effort to see the two-state solution come about.”
She said there could be no going back “to any kind of status quo to try and manage this”.
“It needs a full-blown commitment to the two-state solution. In what form it takes, it's very hard to say at the moment because it needs new leadership in Israel and new leadership on the Palestinian side.”
Ms Robinson went on to say that the US, the EU, and other countries, should be supportive of “a new commitment which would give hope to both Israelis and Palestinians”.
“There can be a situation that will guarantee their security. Israel up to now has felt secure. It felt very secure until the 7th of October. It is not secure anymore. It's very frightened, very worried,” she said.
“It's very clear that something is broken for them at the moment. And they see this military operation as, in some ways, necessary to put an end to Hamas.
But, she said this was “not realistic” because Hamas was embedded in the community.
Ms Robinson also said she and her fellow Elders did not feel as though Mr Netanyahu could be part of a new coalition for peace.
“He has encouraged the widening of settlements, the encroachment on land of Palestinians, and the facts on the ground make it impossible to have a two-state solution,” she said.
“That's been his policy. It's more overt now because he has right-wing colleagues who talk the language of Jewish supremacy and talk about their right to the whole West Bank.”
Ms Robinson said events unfolding in Gaza were “deadly and awful, and shocking for people to even look at on television sets, never mind endure.”
“We have to have a real political effort. We must have President Biden expending a lot of political will to do this, and getting support from the Republicans as well.”
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