Humanitarian access collapses in Gaza City as MSF suspends operations
Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said it has been forced to suspend all operations in Gaza City after its clinics were surrounded by Israeli forces — a blunt sign of how rapidly humanitarian space is narrowing as the Israeli military presses a major offensive into the densely populated urban centre.
- Advertisement -
“We have been left with no choice but to stop our activities as our clinics are encircled by Israeli forces,” Jacob Granger, MSF’s emergency coordinator in Gaza, said in a statement. “This is the last thing we wanted, as the needs in Gaza City are enormous, with the most vulnerable people – infants in neo-natal care, those with severe injuries and life‑threatening illnesses – unable to move and in grave danger.”
What the suspension means on the ground
MSF’s withdrawal is not a bureaucratic pause; it is a life-or-death rupture of care in a city where hospitals and clinics have been straining to cope. Gaza City is both the epicentre of Israel’s current ground offensive and the origin of one of the largest internal displacements in recent memory. Local rescue services operating under Hamas reported at least 50 people killed across the territory on Friday, with around 30 casualties in Gaza City alone, and footage from Al‑Shati refugee camp showed battered façades, toppled poles and children combing rubble barefoot for salvaged possessions.
In narratives from the makeshift camps on Gaza’s Mediterranean coast, the human cost of displacement becomes immediate. “We are piled on top of each other in a single tent — me, my husband, our six children and my husband’s elderly parents — 10 people in a small tent,” said Um Youssef al‑Shaer, 50, describing life in the Al‑Mawasi tent city. Overcrowding, inadequate sanitation and limited medical supplies multiply the dangers of infection, maternal complications and untreated trauma.
Displacement, destruction and divergent accounts
The scale of movement is staggering and contested. Israel’s military has said some 700,000 Palestinians have fled Gaza City since late August. The UN’s humanitarian office, using its own tracking, recorded 388,400 people displaced since mid‑August, most from Gaza City. The discrepancy underscores the chaos of large population movements in the middle of active hostilities and the difficulties agencies face in counting and assisting those on the move.
Israel said its air force struck more than 140 targets across the Gaza Strip in a 24‑hour period, hitting “terrorists, tunnel shafts (and) military infrastructure.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, speaking at the United Nations, cast the campaign in absolute terms, saying Israel had “crushed the bulk” of Hamas’s “terror machine” and vowed to “finish the job.”
That rhetoric crossed into the information space: Netanyahu’s office said the speech was being transmitted on loudspeakers in Gaza and that phones of Gaza residents and Hamas members were being used to carry the address. Residents and journalists on the ground disputed that account. “It’s a lie — we haven’t received any messages or anything on the phone, and we didn’t hear any loudspeakers,” Randa Hanoun, 30, a displaced Palestinian in Deir el‑Balah, told reporters. Two AFP contributors in southern Gaza and one in Gaza City said they had not heard any such broadcasts.
Why the suspension of medical services matters globally
The MSF decision should be read in the context of a worrying international trend: the erosion of medical neutrality in wars dominated by urban combat and asymmetric tactics. Over the conflicts of the past decade — from Syria to Yemen, and in pockets of Africa and Asia — hospitals have repeatedly become frontlines, aid convoys have been blocked, and humanitarian workers have been threatened or killed. When an organization like MSF, which is built on rapid, independent medical response, stops work, the local system often has no redundancies to fall back on.
Gaza’s health ministry, run by Hamas, says Israeli military operations over nearly two years have killed at least 65,549 Palestinians, most of them civilians — a tally the United Nations considers reliable. The sustained toll of casualties, combined with the destruction of infrastructure and the exposure of displaced populations to overcrowding and disease, creates a long tail of human suffering even when active hostilities ebb.
Urban war and the shrinking space for civilians
Urban warfare multiplies risk. Narrow streets, high-rise apartment blocks and dense refugee camps make precision strikes more likely to produce civilian casualties and to sever access for ambulances and aid convoys. When hospitals are surrounded, when clinics are rendered inoperable, and when medical staff cannot move safely, the immediate casualties of conflict merge with preventable deaths from untreated chronic conditions, childbirth complications and infections.
The layers of this crisis — military objectives, political rhetoric, displacement and humanitarian collapse — also reveal the growing role of information operations. Claims about broadcasting speeches into Gaza and taking over residents’ phones reflect a modern battlefield where psychological pressure is a complement to kinetic force. Yet in the camps and tents where families are hiding, such claims are often met with scepticism, exhaustion, and a more urgent question: where will my family sleep tonight, and who will treat my child if he gets sick?
Questions the world must ask
The immediate imperative is protection: how can aid organizations be guaranteed safe, unimpeded access to treat the wounded and care for infants, chronically ill patients and the elderly? Beyond that, there are broader questions that should concern the international community. When does military advantage justify the suspension of essential services? How can international law and humanitarian practice adapt to a world where urban combat is the norm? And what responsibility do states and institutions have to prepare for the long-term consequences of mass displacement?
MSF’s withdrawal from Gaza City is not only a catastrophic operational setback; it is a flashing warning that humanitarian systems — already strained worldwide — are brittle under the pressure of modern warfare. If clinics are encircled and silence meets the drone of planes overhead, who will be left to pick up the pieces?
By Abdiwahab Ahmed
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.
