World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the Israeli army had ordered them to withdraw their supplies from a medical warehouse located in the southern Gaza Strip within the next 24 hours.

“Today WHO received notification from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) that we must remove our supplies from our medical warehouse in the southern Gaza Strip within 24 hours as ground operations will render it unusable,” he explained in his profile on a social network. X, formerly known as Twitter.

Tedros called on Israeli authorities to withdraw the order and “take all possible measures to protect civilians and civilian infrastructure, including hospitals and humanitarian facilities.”

WHO called for protecting the health system from new attacks and deterioration of its capacity and reminded that “nowhere is safe in the Gaza Strip.” “We saw what happened in northern Gaza. This cannot be an example for the south. “Gaza cannot afford to lose another hospital as healthcare needs continue to grow,” the statement said.

The organization, which is “seriously concerned about the resumption of fighting,” stressed that “as more civilians in the south are given immediate evacuation orders and forced to move, more people are being concentrated in smaller areas.” Adding to this situation, the remaining hospitals are operating “without sufficient quantities” of fuel, medicine, food, water and protection for medical personnel.

Some 1.9 million people, almost 80 percent of Gaza’s population, are internally displaced. In less than 60 days, the number of operational hospitals has dropped from 36 to 18. Of these, only three offer basic services and the rest provide only partial services. Some medical centers are treating two to three times more patients than expected.