New Delhi: The World Health Organisation has noted that Lebanon’s healthcare system is overwhelmed in an effort to attend to the large number of people injured in strikes carried out by Israel on Beirut and other areas in Lebanon.
Israel claims that it is pre-emptively thwarting attacks by Hezbollah, an armed militant group in Lebanon. Al Jazeera has reported that least six people have been killed and eight wounded in Israeli air strikes targeting central Beirut overnight. In addition, a further 46 people were killed and 85 injured in Israeli attacks across Lebanon in the previous 24 hours.
Israel’s Beirut airstrike hit an apartment in the residential Bashoura district, not far from the United Nations office, the prime minister’s office, and the Lebanese parliament.
Hezbollah has also made attacks on Israel, Al Jazeera has reported. There was no mention of deaths as a result of these attacks.
“The death toll in Lebanon is rising, and hospitals are overwhelmed with the influx of injured patients. The health system has been weakened by successive crises and is struggling to cope with the immense needs,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus noted on X.
“I met with Arab League Ambassadors in Geneva to discuss the health situation in Lebanon and the region. We agreed that patients, health workers and civilians, including refugees, must be protected and offered the health care they need,” he wrote.
Adding that the WHO is scaling up its response, Ghebreyesus noted that what the people of Lebanon, Gaza, Israel and throughout West Asia “need is peace.”
“The violence must end to prevent more loss and suffering. Any further escalation of the conflict will have catastrophic consequences for the region. The best medicine is peace,” he further wrote.
More than 1,000 people have died in Lebanon starting from Israeli strikes on Beirut, according to Lebanese authorities.
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