The World Health Organization said on Tuesday that 8,000 patients in Gaza need to be evacuated from Gaza, expressing its disappointment that only a small number of patients were able to leave the besieged Strip to receive treatment abroad.

A team from the World Health Organization and its partners were able to once again reach hospitals in northern Gaza, where they confirmed high levels of malnutrition among Palestinians, the death of children due to hunger, severe scarcity of fuel, food and medical supplies, and the destruction of hospital buildings.

The representative of the World Health Organization in the occupied Palestinian territory, Rick Peppercorn, said that most of the missions that were scheduled to go to northern Gaza in January had been rejected, and only 3 of them had been approved. In February, no mission was able to reach the region.

The Israeli occupation forces prevented medical and UN missions and humanitarian aid convoys from reaching the northern Gaza Strip.

Peppercon added in a press conference held in the Swiss city of Geneva, in which he spoke via video from occupied Jerusalem, that the organization and its partners were finally able to reach the two hospitals of the martyr Kamal Adwan and return on the third of this month. This was the hospitals' first mission since early October, despite repeated efforts to reach northern Gaza.

The team was able to deliver 9,500 liters of fuel to each hospital and some basic medical supplies, although it was a small percentage of the volume of badly needed supplies, the World Health Organization official said.

Rick Peppercorn added that the situation in Al Awda Hospital, in particular, is horrific.

He said that Kamal Adwan Hospital, the only children's hospital in northern Gaza, is operating beyond its maximum capacity as it is overcrowded with patients.

He warned that power outages pose a major risk to patient care, especially in intensive care and the neonatal care unit.

Malnutrition represents a major threat to the population of Gaza, especially young children, as it can lead to wasting and its irreversible consequences. Gaza's self-sufficiency in fish and other food products protected the population from such risks. But now a representative of the World Health Organization indicates that wasting affects 15.6% of children under the age of two in northern Gaza.

The UN official said that only 12 hospitals in Gaza are partially operating, 6 in the north and 6 in the south, and that 23 hospitals have stopped working completely. Because of this situation, the World Health Organization is calling for a significant increase in medical evacuation from Gaza.

Peppercorn said: “We estimate that 8,000 patients must be referred outside Gaza, 6,000 of whom are war-related injuries and 2,000 have other diseases.”

The World Health Organization said that the period between October 7 and February 20 witnessed the evacuation of only 2,203 patients, although Egypt and a number of other countries offered to receive patients and injured people from Gaza hospitals.

In turn, UNICEF spokesman James Alder pointed out the "serious consequences" for children in those facilities. He said: “It is reported that at least 10 children died due to dehydration and malnutrition in Kamal Adwan Hospital in the northern Gaza Strip. It is likely that a large number of other children are fighting for their lives. These deaths are man-made, expected and preventable.”

A spokesman for the United Nations Children's Fund said that more children are likely to die in the coming days if the scope of aid is not expanded without delay.

Hunger, or an absolute lack of calories, can lead to things like organ failure, Elder said.

But before this stage is reached, severe malnutrition can be a major underlying cause of death, making children more vulnerable to death from common childhood diseases. So the fact that malnutrition is now also listed as a direct cause of child mortality is “alarming,” Elder said.

While the term famine might attract more media attention, he stressed that it "doesn't make much difference to the children on the ground."

For his part, spokesman for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Jens Laerke, said: “With the start of recording deaths among children...due to hunger, we are facing an alarm the likes of which we have never faced before.”

Laerke asked, "If we do not put an end to what is happening now, then when will we do it? When will the moment come to take urgent measures and make the aid flow to Gaza, which needs it?"

"This is what we want to happen," he added.

A United Nations report in January indicated that more than 15 percent of children under two years old in northern Gaza, or one in every six children, suffer from acute malnutrition, while 3 percent suffer from severe wasting that threatens their lives.

In the southern Gaza Strip, 5 percent of children under two years suffer from acute malnutrition, according to the same report, while the World Health Organization warned that the situation has likely worsened in the past few weeks.

The United Nations and humanitarian agencies have certain criteria to determine the state of famine, which has not yet been declared in the Gaza Strip, despite the catastrophic situation there.

The death toll in the Gaza Strip has risen to 30,631, the majority of whom are children and women, since the start of the Israeli aggression on the 7th of last October.