Israeli operation leaves Rafah's hospitals overwhelmed

Even without a full-scale Israeli ground invasion, Rafah's medical facilities have been overwhelmed.Medics say more than a million people sheltering in the southern Gaza city are at risk of being deprived of healthcare after the Israeli military began a "limited" operation against Hamas on its eastern outskirts on Monday. 

The largest of the city's three partially functioning hospitals, Abu Youssef al-Najjar, had to be hastily abandoned the following day after staff received an evacuation order and there was fighting nearby.The hospital's dialysis department had been the only surviving one in Gaza, a lifeline for patients suffering kidney failure.

The Israeli advance has also cut off access to the nearby European Gaza Hospital in Khan Younis, where critical patients were being referred for surgery, as well as the nearby Rafah and Kerem Shalom border crossings. With the Emirati maternity hospital in Rafah busy delivering dozens of babies each day, the Kuwaiti Specialist hospital is struggling to cope with a surge of emergency cases despite a lack of capacity, staff and equipment. One doctor at the hospital, which before the war had only four intensive care beds, said the situation there was "catastrophic in every sense of the word".