Fighting, Fuel Shortages Knock Out Gaza’s Second-Largest Hospital

A Palestinian child walks past a destroyed house in Rafah on February 18, 2024, following overnight Israeli air strikes on the southern Gaza Strip border city amid ongoing battles between Israel and the Palestinian Hamas movement. (AFP)
A Palestinian child walks past a destroyed house in Rafah on February 18, 2024, following overnight Israeli air strikes on the southern Gaza Strip border city amid ongoing battles between Israel and the Palestinian Hamas movement. (AFP)
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Fighting, Fuel Shortages Knock Out Gaza’s Second-Largest Hospital

A Palestinian child walks past a destroyed house in Rafah on February 18, 2024, following overnight Israeli air strikes on the southern Gaza Strip border city amid ongoing battles between Israel and the Palestinian Hamas movement. (AFP)
A Palestinian child walks past a destroyed house in Rafah on February 18, 2024, following overnight Israeli air strikes on the southern Gaza Strip border city amid ongoing battles between Israel and the Palestinian Hamas movement. (AFP)

Fighting, fuel shortages and Israeli raids put the Gaza Strip's second-largest hospital completely out of service on Sunday, local and UN health officials said, as Israel battled Hamas militants in the devastated Palestinian enclave.

The Nasser Hospital in the southern city of Khan Younis still sheltered scores of patients suffering from war wounds and Gaza's worsening health crisis, but there was no power and not enough staff to treat them all, health officials said.

"It's gone completely out of service," Gaza health ministry spokesperson Ashraf al-Qidra told Reuters.

 "There are only four medical teams - 25 staff - currently caring for patients inside the facility," he said.

Gaza's hospitals have been a focal point of the four-month-old war between Israel and Palestinian militant group Hamas, which controls the besieged territory.

Most have been put out of action by fighting and lack of fuel, leaving a population of 2.3 million without proper healthcare while tens of thousands have been wounded by airstrikes and many others suffer from chronic illness and, increasingly, starvation.

Israel has raided medical facilities alleging that Hamas keeps weapons and hostages in hospitals. Hamas denies this. The international community says hospitals, which are protected under international law, must be protected.

The World Health Organization (WHO) urged Israel to grant its staff access to the hospital, where it said a week-long siege and raids by Israeli forces searching for Hamas militants had stopped them from helping patients.

"Both yesterday and the day before, the @WHO team was not permitted to enter the hospital to assess the conditions of the patients and critical medical needs, despite reaching the hospital compound to deliver fuel," WHO head Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on social media platform X.

The Israeli military said its special forces were operating in and around Nasser Hospital, and had killed dozens of Palestinian militants and seized a large amount of weapons in fighting across Gaza over the past day.

"Dozens of terrorists were eliminated and large quantities of weapons were seized," it said in a statement.

The military said this week it was hunting for militants in Nasser and had arrested at least 100 suspects on the premises, killed gunmen near the hospital and found weapons inside it.

Hamas has denied allegations that its fighters use medical facilities for cover.

Israel's air and ground offensive has devastated much of Gaza and forced nearly all of its inhabitants from their homes. Palestinian health authorities say 28,985 people, mostly civilians, have been killed.

The war began when Hamas sent fighters into Israel on Oct. 7, killing 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and seizing 253 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.



Tens of Thousands Go Hungry in Sudan after Trump Aid Freeze

(FILES) A woman collects food at a location set up by a local humanitarian organisation to donate meals and medication to people displaced by the war in Sudan, in Meroe in the country's Northern State, on January 9, 2025. (Photo by AFP)
(FILES) A woman collects food at a location set up by a local humanitarian organisation to donate meals and medication to people displaced by the war in Sudan, in Meroe in the country's Northern State, on January 9, 2025. (Photo by AFP)
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Tens of Thousands Go Hungry in Sudan after Trump Aid Freeze

(FILES) A woman collects food at a location set up by a local humanitarian organisation to donate meals and medication to people displaced by the war in Sudan, in Meroe in the country's Northern State, on January 9, 2025. (Photo by AFP)
(FILES) A woman collects food at a location set up by a local humanitarian organisation to donate meals and medication to people displaced by the war in Sudan, in Meroe in the country's Northern State, on January 9, 2025. (Photo by AFP)

For the first time in nearly two years of war, soup kitchens in famine-stricken Sudan are being forced to turn people away, with US President Donald Trump's aid freeze gutting the life-saving schemes.

"People will die because of these decisions," said a Sudanese fundraising volunteer, who has been scrambling to find money to feed tens of thousands of people in the capital Khartoum.

"We have 40 kitchens across the country feeding between 30,000 to 35,000 people every day," another Sudanese volunteer told AFP, saying all of them had closed after Trump announced the freezing of foreign assistance and the dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

"Women and children are being turned away and we can't promise them when we can feed them again," she said, requesting anonymity for fear that speaking publicly could jeopardize her work.

In much of Sudan, community-run soup kitchens are the only thing preventing mass starvation and many of them rely on US funding.

"The impact of the decision to withdraw funding in this abrupt manner has life-ending consequences," Javid Abdelmoneim, medical team leader at Doctors Without Borders (MSF) in Khartoum's twin city of Omdurman, told AFP.

"This is yet another disaster for people in Sudan, already suffering the consequences of violence, hunger, a collapse of the healthcare system and a woeful international humanitarian response," he added.

Shortly after his inauguration last month, Trump froze US foreign aid and announced the dismantling of USAID.

His administration then issued waivers for "life-saving humanitarian assistance", but there have so far been no signs of this taking effect in Sudan and aid workers said their efforts were already crippled.

In what the United Nations has decried as a global "state of confusion", agencies on the ground in Sudan have been forced to halt essential food, shelter and health operations.

"All official communications have gone dark," another Sudanese aid coordinator told AFP, after USAID workers were put on leave this week.

The kitchens that have survived "are stretching resources and sharing as much as they can", he said.

"But there's just not enough to go around."

As one of the few independent organizations still standing in Sudan, MSF said it had been fielding requests from local responders to quickly step in.

However, "MSF can't fill the gap left by the US funding withdrawal," Abdelmoneim said.

The United States was the largest single donor to Sudan last year, contributing $800 million or around 46 percent of funds to the UN's response plan.

The UN estimates it currently has less than 6 percent of the humanitarian funding needed for Sudan in 2025.

Over 8 million people are on the brink of famine in Sudan, according to the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification.

Famine is expected to spread to at least five more areas of Sudan by May, before the upcoming rainy season is likely to make access to food all the more difficult across the country.