The United Nations denounced Israel's deliberate destruction of complex and difficult-to-obtain medical equipment in hospitals and maternity wards in Gaza.
Recent U.N.-led missions to 10 Gaza hospitals found many "in ruins" and just a couple capable of providing any level of maternal health services, said Dominic Allen, the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA) representative for the State of Palestine.
He said that what the teams found at the Nasser hospital complex, long besieged by Israeli forces during their operations in the southern city of Khan Younis, "breaks my heart."
Speaking to journalists in Geneva via video link from Jerusalem, he described seeing "medical equipment purposefully broken, ultrasounds – which you will know, is a very important tool for helping ensure safe births – with cables that have been cut."
"Screens of complex medical equipment, like ultrasounds and others with the screens smashed," he added.
The World Health Organization has described the difficulty of bringing such equipment into Gaza even before the current war erupted following Hamas's Oct.7 attack inside Israel.
Meanwhile, at Al-Khair, another specialized maternity hospital in Khan Younis, "it didn't seem as if there was any piece of working medical equipment," he said, lamenting that the birthing rooms "stand silent."
"They should be a place to give life and just have an eerie sense of death."
Only 10 of Gaza's 36 hospitals are currently even partially functioning.
Allen said that only three of those were now capable of assisting the estimated 180 women giving birth across Gaza every single day – around 15% of whom suffer complications requiring significant care.
The hospitals that can provide such care are thus facing significant capacity constraints.
The Emirati Hospital in the south, the main maternity hospital in Gaza currently, is, for instance, supporting up to 60 births every day, including as many as 12 Caesarian sections, he said.
Given the heavy pressure on the facility, women are discharged just hours after giving birth, "and after C-sections, it is less than a day," Allen said, stressing "that increases risks."
Israel has waged a brutal offensive on the Gaza Strip since an Oct. 7, 2023, cross-border attack by the Palestinian group Hamas, in which nearly 1,200 people were killed.
Nearly 34,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, have since been killed in Gaza and over 76,800 others have been injured amid mass destruction and shortages of necessities.
The Israeli war has pushed 85% of Gaza's population into internal displacement amid acute shortages of food, clean water and medicine, while 60% of the enclave's infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed, according to the U.N.
Israel stands accused of genocide at the International Court of Justice. An interim ruling in January ordered Tel Aviv to stop genocidal acts and take measures to guarantee that humanitarian assistance is provided to civilians in Gaza.