Hospitals across the besieged Gaza Strip are teetering on the edge of collapse as a devastating fuel crisis, caused by the ongoing Israeli blockade, endangers the lives of countless patients.

Medical sources have sounded the alarm, warning that severely limited fuel access is crippling healthcare services and putting thousands at risk—especially those in intensive care and dependent on life-saving equipment.

For months, the Zionist entity has maintained a stranglehold on fuel entry into Gaza, tightening its blockade and leaving hospitals without the necessary diesel to power generators, life-support machines, and ambulances. As a result, medical facilities have been forced to make impossible choices: shutting down departments, suspending dialysis treatments, and delaying vital surgeries.

Ambulance services, too, have been decimated by the fuel shortages. In heartbreaking scenes, wounded civilians are now being transported on donkey carts and wheelbarrows, as fuel-starved emergency vehicles stand idle.

Health professionals on the front lines describe working under conditions of extreme duress and danger. “We are prioritizing the most critical cases, but we don’t know how much longer we can keep people alive,” said one doctor from a central Gaza hospital, speaking on condition of anonymity due to security concerns.

The fuel entering Gaza—if any—is delivered in trickling quantities, far below what is needed to sustain full hospital operations. This daily shortfall forces staff into a grim cycle of triage, with lives hanging in the balance.

“This is a deliberate act of collective punishment,” said a spokesperson from Gaza’s Health Ministry. “Preventing hospitals from functioning is a war crime. This blockade is not just about borders; it is about life and death.”

Medical authorities in Gaza are calling upon international humanitarian organizations, Muslim nations, and free peoples around the world to urgently intervene and put pressure on the occupation regime to lift the fuel blockade. “Each delay in action costs innocent lives,” the statement read.

The humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Gaza is a direct result of the Israeli occupation’s brutal siege policy, which continues to target civilians by crippling their access to basic necessities—electricity, medicine, clean water, and now, fuel.

As Gaza’s hospitals run on fumes and its people face death not only from bombs but from suffocation by siege, the world must not remain silent. Lives are being lost not due to lack of knowledge or ability, but because of a system designed to make Palestinian suffering unbearable. (ILKHA)