Ten months after the ceasefire, not one hospital has been restored to full capacity. For the families in the displacement camps, the system has not merely collapsed — it has receded beyond reach.

Aalimi Nation · Opinion

There are 2,200 inpatient beds in the Gaza Strip. There are roughly two million people.

That ratio is the whole argument, and everything that follows is detail. But the detail matters, because it explains why a shortage of beds is not experienced equally — and why, for the poorest people in Gaza, the right to health has quietly become something closer to a privilege.

As of June 2026, according to the United Nations, only 19 of Gaza's hospitals and 73 of its 158 health centres were partially operational. Despite the ceasefire that took effect on 10 October 2025, it has not been possible to restore a single facility to full operational capacity. The entire territory has 107 intensive care beds.

Before the war, Al Shifa Hospital alone had 700 beds — a comparison drawn by the Palestinian physician writing in Al Jazeera this week, who worked in that hospital in November 2023.

The word doing the heaviest lifting in the UN's assessment is "partially." A partially functioning hospital is a building with most of its wards unusable, performing a fraction of the procedures it was designed for, without the laboratory tests, the surgical capacity or, frequently, the specialists required to make a diagnosis mean anything.

The workforce that was killed

Systems are made of people, and this one has been dismantled at the level of individuals.

More than 1,700 health workers have been killed or injured since October 2023, including some of the few remaining specialist doctors in Gaza. Others have been detained. The World Health Organization has documented 971 attacks on health care, affecting at least 804 health facilities and 268 ambulances.

Those figures describe something more consequential than damaged infrastructure. Buildings can be rebuilt in a year. A paediatric surgeon takes fifteen. When a specialist is killed, the capability leaves with them, and every patient who would have needed that specialist over the following three decades is affected by a single death.

Why the camps are where this lands hardest

Here is the part that receives least attention, and it is the reason for this article.

Nearly the entire population of 2.1 million has been repeatedly displaced, with the majority now confined to less than half of the Strip. Hundreds of thousands live in tent camps. And the health system, such as it survives, is concentrated in the partially functioning hospitals — which is to say, somewhere else.

Three barriers separate a sick person in a camp from care, and none of them is medical.

Distance and its price. Reaching a functioning facility requires transport. Transport costs money. For families struggling to secure a daily meal, the fare to a hospital is a genuine household decision, weighed against food. Illness is therefore rationed by income, in a population that has lost nearly all of its income.

Primary care has effectively ceased. Across the occupied Palestinian territory, 63 per cent of primary health care centres are only partially functional, opening on average one day a week — down from six before 2023. Primary care is what catches diabetes before amputation, hypertension before stroke, infection before sepsis. Where it disappears, people arrive at hospitals later and sicker, and the emergency system absorbs a burden it was never designed to carry.

The environment itself is pathogenic. OCHA estimates that 98 per cent of the water available in Gaza is unsafe for human consumption, with nearly 90 per cent of water infrastructure damaged or destroyed. A camp without sanitation, without safe water, exposed to summer heat and winter cold, generates illness faster than any clinic could treat it. Medicine cannot outrun an environment that keeps producing patients.

The result is a two-tier reality inside a single territory: those close enough, mobile enough and solvent enough to reach a partially functioning hospital, and those who are not.

The law is not ambiguous

It is worth stating plainly what standard applies, because this is not a matter of charity.

The right to the highest attainable standard of health is guaranteed under Article 12 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The Fourth Geneva Convention obliges an occupying power to ensure and maintain medical and hospital services and public health in occupied territory, to the fullest extent of the means available to it. Attacks on medical facilities and personnel are prohibited under international humanitarian law, and intentionally directing attacks against hospitals constitutes a war crime under the Rome Statute.

Nearly a thousand documented attacks on health care, and a system that ten months into a ceasefire cannot restore a single hospital to full function, are not consistent with those obligations by any reading.

What would actually change things

Condemnation is not a policy. Four measures would alter conditions in the camps within months rather than years.

Restore primary care where people actually are. Fixed clinics in camps and mobile teams reaching tents, resourced to manage chronic disease and treat infection, would remove most of the journeys that currently do not happen. This is the single highest-return intervention available, and it requires no reconstruction.

Fund UNRWA to do it. Whatever the political arguments surrounding the agency, it retains the distribution network, the staff and the community trust that a camp-level health response requires. No alternative structure exists at that scale. Building one from scratch would take years the patients do not have.

Unblock supplies and equipment. WHO has been explicit that a scaled health response depends on the timely entry of supplies at scale, an easing of dual-use categorisation, and removal of bureaucratic impediments and access restrictions. Equipment held at a crossing treats nobody.

Fix medical evacuation. More than 10,700 patients have been evacuated from Gaza since October 2023 — but in January 2026, the figure was 63. Against a caseload including more than 5,000 amputees and tens of thousands with life-changing injuries, that rate is not a corridor. It is a queue that outlives the people standing in it.

The counter-arguments, stated fairly

Israel's government maintains that its operations targeted militants who, it says, used medical facilities and that restrictions on certain goods are necessary to prevent dual-use items reaching armed groups. It disputes the completeness of casualty and damage figures produced by Gaza's health authorities. Some donor states argue that funding channelled through UNRWA cannot be adequately monitored.

Those positions deserve to be heard, and reasonable people weigh them differently. But they operate at a different level from the question at hand. A dispute about aggregate casualty figures does not affect the count of ICU beds, which is 107. A security rationale for inspecting cargo does not explain why hospitals remain unrestored ten months after the guns quieted. And a governance objection to one agency is an argument for improving oversight, not for leaving camp populations without primary care while a replacement is designed.

Whatever one concludes about the conduct of the war, the obligation to provide health care to a civilian population under occupation is not contingent on that conclusion.

The measure

Gaza's health crisis has left the front pages. There are no raids on hospitals to film now, no bombed wards. The catastrophe has become chronic, and chronic catastrophes are quiet.

But a system does not have to be attacked to fail. It only has to be left as it is — 19 partial hospitals, 107 intensive care beds, primary care one day a week, and several hundred thousand people living in tents beyond the reach of any of it.

The right to health is not measured by what a state of exception permits. It is measured by whether a woman in a tent in Gaza City, with a child running a fever and no fare for the journey, can obtain treatment.

At present, she cannot. That is the whole of it.

Figures in this article are drawn from the World Health Organization, UN OCHA and the UN's August 2026 assessment of health access in the Gaza Strip. The comparison with Al Shifa Hospital's pre-war capacity appeared in an opinion column published by Al Jazeera on 24 August 2026. The views expressed are Aalimi Nation's own.