The Israeli occupation’s genocide hasn’t stopped at bombing and deliberately targeting children and the elderly; it extends to the slow killing of patients and infants whose lives depend on oxygen stations that have been struggling to function for two and a half years due to a shortage of spare parts.
A report documents the complaints of patients inside Nasser Medical Complex, where Palestinian Bilal races against time, carrying an oxygen cylinder on his weary shoulders to save his father. Meanwhile, sixty-year-old Alaa al-Harani describes his suffering in stark terms: “There are moments when I wish for death from exhaustion and pain. If the oxygen supply is delayed by even an hour or less, I’ll be among the dead.” This reflects the plight of thousands of patients struggling for a single breath under a suffocating siege.
According to the Ministry of Health in Gaza, the Israeli occupation has destroyed 22 out of 34 oxygen stations that supplied hospitals, while the remaining stations operate intermittently. Furthermore, the occupation prevents the entry of spare parts for these stations.
Ismail Abu Nimr, the maintenance manager at Nasser Medical Complex, confirms that the disruption of these oxygen stations has catastrophic consequences for intensive care units, operating rooms, maternity wards, and even for infants in incubators who require continuous oxygen.
In the emergency rooms, the shortage is most evident. Nurse Bahaa al-Nims recounts the case of a kidney failure patient whose oxygen saturation had plummeted to 69%, forcing the medical staff to place him on a makeshift oxygen cylinder while he awaited his turn for emergency dialysis, in a desperate attempt to keep him alive.
For his part, Dr. Khalil al-Daqran, spokesperson for Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, affirmed that the occupation has been directly and continuously targeting the health system since the beginning of the aggression.
During his remarks, he explained that the remaining stations have been operating for two and a half years without maintenance due to the prevention of spare parts from entering the country, making them vulnerable to sudden shutdowns at any moment, which amounts to a death sentence for thousands of patients.
Al-Daqran revealed that medical teams resorted to primitive methods to cope with the shortage, by manually transporting oxygen cylinders from one hospital to another, a method he describes as insufficient and not meeting the minimum actual need, especially for vital departments such as nurseries and intensive care.
