RAMALLAH, (PIC)
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has stressed the need for safe and timely access to adequate health care in the West Bank as humanitarian needs grow.
In a press release issued on Tuesday, the ICRC stated that Palestinians in the West Bank have faced difficult conditions over the past 18 months, with dozens killed and injured and thousands forcibly displaced from their homes.
It stressed that international humanitarian law stipulates that the occupying power must ensure the safety and preservation of medical facilities and services in the occupied territories, as well as medical supplies, and that civilians must have safe and timely access to them.
The ICRC noted that it continues to support the health sector in the West Bank to ensure the provision of health care in conditions that are becoming increasingly difficult, adding that it has recently delivered essential medical supplies to the Ministry of Health in Nablus, including life-saving items such as anesthetics and specialized burn supplies, it added.
Meanwhile, the ICRC Director-General, Pierre Krähenbühl, said on Monday, “a new inferno has been unleashed on Gaza following the restart of war in the Palestinian territory.”
“Gaza is experiencing and enduring death, injury, multiple displacements, amputations, separation, disappearance, starvation and denial of aid and dignity on a massive scale,” he added.
In his speech at the Global Security Forum in the Qatari capital, Doha, Krähenbühl said, “just when the important ceasefire on January 19 led people to believe they had survived the worst, a new inferno was unleashed.”
On March 18, Israel reneged on the ceasefire and prisoner exchange agreement in place since January 19 and resumed its war of genocide on the Gaza Strip, despite Hamas’s commitment to all terms of the agreement.
With unconditional US support, Israel has been committing genocide in Gaza since October 7, 2023, leaving some 169,000 Palestinians martyred or wounded, most of them children and women, and more than 11,000 missing.
