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Weeks of intense fighting has left medical services and facilities in the Gaza Strip “on the verge of collapse,” according to senior United Nations officials in the region who today warned that a health disaster of widespread proportions is rapidly unfolding as the conflict grinds on. “We are now looking at a health and humanitarian disaster”, warned James W. Rawley, the UN Humanitarian Coordinator in the occupied Palestinian territory, adding: “The fighting must stop immediately.”

Overnight Israel punished the town of Rafah, 30 kilometres south of Gaza, relentlessly. It’s where the Israeli soldier Hadar Goldin went missing on Friday after an ambush by Hamas forces. In the past 24 hours, more than 60 people have died there, according to the health ministry. The only acute hospital was evacuated after a shell hit the entrance of its emergency room. At the Shifa hospital in Gaza City doctors are struggling.

The Philippines began to evacuate 13,000 citizens from Libya as violence continued to rage, AFP reported. The move came after a kidnapped Filipino worker was beheaded and a nurse gang-raped. Libya has warned of a “total collapse” of its health care system, as the security chaos threatens to send into flight many of the foreign workers on whom its hospitals depend.

There is war in Gaza again. At this time, it seems like heavy smoke is covering the area, the media, consciousness, and the entire future. But one thing can be already stated with certainty: the casualties of this war have already paid the price. Its dead have already died; its wounded will go on to contend with the pain and trauma for the rest of their lives. As health and medical professionals, Jews and Arabs, our position is no more moral than that of anyone else, but by dint of our positions and our ongoing work, our point of view is different.

Intense shelling and aerial assaults in northern and central Iraq have hit hospitals and other medical facilities, some supported by the international medical organisation Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), depriving civilians of much needed medical care. MSF calls upon all parties to the conflict to respect health facilities, to allow medical staff to continue carrying out their work, and to preserve full access to health services.