WHO says medical supplies wait median 74 days for Gaza clearance as hospitals stay crippled

Getting humanitarian aid through Israel into Gaza is layered with “delay after delay”, the World Health Organization said on Friday, decrying “chronic shortages” of medical supplies in the territory.

Reinhilde Van de Weerdt, the WHO’s representative in the Palestinian territories, told reporters in Geneva, speaking from Jerusalem, that Gaza’s health situation “remains utterly dire”, with none of the territory’s hospitals fully functional.

“Not enough humanitarian aid is entering Gaza, and definitely not enough to allow for a meaningful expansion and restoration of health services,” she said.

She said Israel’s approval system for medical and other humanitarian supplies was proving a major bottleneck. “It is laborious, time-consuming, with no guaranteed results,” she said. Based on the WHO’s latest analysis, large volumes of medical supplies wait for clearance for a median of 74 days — and if clearance is not granted, “we start that lengthy, cumbersome process all over again”.

Van de Weerdt said standard health kits used worldwide had the lowest approval rate, while X-ray machines, sterilisation equipment and spare parts for CT scans “get rejected regularly”. In the last six months alone, one shipment of prosthetics and assistive devices was rejected four separate times. Medicines move “relatively well”, with almost 87 per cent approved and one per cent rejected, she added.

“It’s not one single blockage. It’s a system, layered with delay after delay … and on the other side of every one of these delays is a patient who is waiting,” she said.

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

Van de Weerdt called for the “unimpeded and predictable entry of humanitarian and health supplies into Gaza, at scale”, urging Israel to “at least release the pressure on medical supplies”, open more crossings and publish clear guidance on processes and requirements.

She added that success should not be measured in numbers of trucks crossing the border, which says “almost nothing about whether people’s actual health needs are being met”. “A truck full of non-priority supplies, or the right supplies arriving too late, doesn’t save lives,” she said.

The Gaza war was sparked by Hamas’s October 2023 attack, which killed 1,221 people according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures. The Israeli offensive since has left most of Gaza in ruins and killed more than 74,000 people, according to Gaza’s health ministry, whose figures are considered reliable by the United Nations.