Hospitals Medics in Gaza say hunger is affecting their work

Doctors and medical staff in Gaza say their increasing hunger and the lack of available food is beginning to leave them too weak to provide urgent medical care to patients inside hospitals full of malnourished and injured civilians.

- Annie Kelly Hoda Osman

Almost a dozen medical staff across the territory have told the Guardian and Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ) of their increasingly desperate search for food and declining physical health as a result of hunger.

"They are in a state of extreme exhaustion. Some have fainted in the operating rooms," said Dr Mohammed Abu Selmia, the director of al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City, who said that like the people of Gaza, staff had not received any aid or had any meals in the past 48 hours.

"Medical services will be affected because our staff will not be able to hold out any longer in the face of this famine," he added.

Many of the doctors and medical practitioners who sent messages to the Guardian did not want to be named as they feared being targeted by the Israeli military.