GENEVA: The World Health Organization warned on Tuesday its ability to provide aid and support struggling hospitals in war-ravaged Gaza was “shrinking”, despite international demands for more aid to be allowed in. WHO staff described desperate scenes of seriously injured patients, including young children, begging for food in hospitals — which have seen most of their health workers flee for their own safety.

“We’re seeing this humanitarian catastrophe unfold before our eyes,” Sean Casey, a WHO emergency medical teams coordinator, told reporters in Geneva via videolink from the Gaza Strip. “We’re seeing the health system collapse at a very rapid pace,” he warned.

The Israeli army has claimed the war is entering a new phase, involving troop reductions and more targeted operations in the territory’s centre and south.

But Casey said that on the ground, he had “not seen the lowering of the intensification”.

“What we are still seeing... is a huge number of casualties related to hostilities, so shrapnel injuries, gunshot wounds, crush injuries from buildings that collapse. That’s still happening every single day.”

The war followed an attack by Hamas on October 7 that resulted in the death of about 1,140 peoples in Israel, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.

The Palestinian group also took around 250 hostages that day, 132 of whom remain captive, Israel says. Of those, at least 25 are believed to have been killed.

Israel has retaliated with relentless bombardments and a ground invasion of Gaza that in three months have killed more than 23,200 people, most of them women and children, according to Gaza’s health ministry.