CGTN Europe speaks to Dr. Margaret Harris from the World Health Organization. She describes the appalling situation at Kamal Adwan hospital in North Gaza, which has been attacked dozens of times by Israel and is now put out of service.
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00:00Dr. Margaret Harris is from the World Health Organization. She joins us now.
00:03Doc, thanks so much for your time. I wonder if you could tell us what your
00:07teams on the ground near the hospital are telling you about what's happening
00:12and has happened at Kamal Adwan.
00:14Good afternoon, Sally, and thanks for having me.
00:18Our teams are just appalled by this morning, by yesterday's raid on Kamal
00:23Adwan. It's put the last major health facility in North Gaza out of service
00:28and this is a hospital. Our teams have worked really hard to keep going.
00:32It's been attacked and attacked and attacked under siege since October.
00:37We've recorded more than 50 attacks on the hospital and we've continually,
00:41continually called for urgent calls to protect the health workers in the
00:47hospitals as under international humanitarian law and yet these
00:52calls have remained unheard and now we understand there may still be patients
00:58in the hospital but we don't know who's looking after them. There were at least
01:0225 critically ill patients. Some of them are on ventilators and we fear, we really
01:08fear for their lives.
01:09Israel says that hospital was being used as a command
01:13center by Hamas, that they gave patients time to evacuate. How do you square that
01:19up with what you're hearing from your teams?
01:23So our teams have been up as often as they can to Kamal Adwan. A lot of those missions were
01:29denied, by the way, more than 50 percent. The IDF, the military refused to allow us
01:35and they refused to allow us to bring extra international volunteer doctors
01:40and nurses to help the health workers but we never saw anything that wasn't
01:46health care going on and I've never even heard a peep in any of the meetings,
01:50nobody's even raised concerns that something else could be going on.
01:55The concerns that our team have are that the staff are overworked, they're exhausted,
02:01they didn't have the equipment and they were under constant bombardment and
02:05seeing their colleagues killed.
02:07I have to ask you about what happened in Yemen on Friday.
02:12The head of your organization, Tedros Ghebreyesus, he was with a team, a WHO team,
02:17at the Sana'a airport in Yemen. When it was struck, we've seen startling images of him being,
02:22you know, the whole team trying to run away. Luckily, one person who was hurt is,
02:27we understand, in a stable condition within your team, though of course two civilians,
02:31we understand, died. But when you look at a situation like what happened on Friday,
02:36where the head of your organization could have been gravely injured or worse,
02:41is this just seen by the WHO as, this was just a risky place to be?
02:45Or is this something more serious, more unprecedented, that you're concerned about?
02:51Well, I think I'd quote Dr. Tedros himself. He was saying, basically, at the moment,
02:56the world is a horrifically dangerous place because the rules have been thrown out.
03:02The rules that you leave civilian infrastructure, that you protect civilians.
03:08If you think you must have a conflict, there are rules of engagement. It's a military conflict.
03:13But we are seeing increasingly, it's the civilians and the civilian infrastructure.
03:18In fact, Dr. Tedros was just meters away from death. He was leading a UN delegation to try
03:24to negotiate the release of humanitarian workers who'd been detained in Yemen, some of them for
03:30years. And there was an opportunity to get some movement on that. So he gave up his Christmas
03:36and went to Yemen to do that. But as he said, he said, I'm just one person. It doesn't matter
03:41who I am. The civilians, it's a civilian airport used for civilian activities.
03:49And people were killed. And that is happening every day.