MSF physiotherapist Fadi al-Wadiya treats a young patient at Bitlahia clinic in northern Gaza. The health facility was previously supported by MSF. (File photo)
Geneva, June 27 (RHC)-- Doctors Without Borders (MSF) has denounced the killing of one of its workers, Fadi al-Wadiya, in an attack by Israeli forces in the besieged Gaza Strip.
“The attack killed Fadi, along with 5 other people including 3 children, while he was riding his bicycle to work, near the MSF clinic where he was providing care,” MSF said on X on Tuesday. “Killing a healthcare worker while on his way to provide vital medical care to wounded victims of the endless massacres across Gaza is beyond shocking; it’s cynical and abhorrent,” said Caroline Seguin, MSF’s operations manager for Palestine.
Wadiya was 33 years old, the group said, and is the sixth of its workers to be killed in Gaza since October 7th.
On Monday, Israel killed the director of ambulance and emergency services in Gaza. Hani Jafrawi was killed in an airstrike on the Darj health clinic in Gaza City in the early hours of Monday. He died alongside another healthcare worker.
Jafrawi was reported to be the 500th medical worker killed by Israeli forces since that October day.
Speaking to journalists in Geneva following a three-month stint in the besieged Palestinian territory, Yasmina Guerda of the UN humanitarian agency OCHA warned about the deteriorating humanitarian crisis.
She said children had lost limbs in Israel’s attack on the Nuseirat refugee camp earlier this month.
The regime killed at least 274 people and injured more than 700 there. “Many of whom reminded me of my own two little toddlers. They were staring into the void, too shell-shocked to produce a sound or a tear,” she said.
For Guerda, there are no “living conditions” in the besieged region. “What they have … are survival conditions, and barely. They are holding on by a thread.”
She said aid workers were trying to “quantify the suffering with figures,” looking at the total number of displaced people, the liters of water they get per day, or the truckloads of aid that make it across the border. “But it doesn’t matter,” she said. “Those numbers, they’re never near enough … [for] a population that has lost nearly everything.”
Israel’s savage military campaign has displaced much of Gaza’s 2.4 million population – some multiple times.
“There are no safe centimeters left in Gaza,” Guerda said.
