The United Nations is planning a mission to Al-Shifa Hospital as soon as it is "allowed to help people receive medical attention and to assess the facility," the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said Monday.
The announcement comes after Israel ended its 14-day siege on Gaza’s largest hospital on Monday.
At least 300 bodies have been uncovered there so far, according to Gaza’s Civil Defense, and one witness described the destructive aftermath as like a scene from a "horror movie."
The United Nations also said a WHO team visited the Al-Aqsa Hospital in central Gaza on Sunday when a tent camp inside the compound was hit by an Israeli airstrike.
On Sunday, Martin Griffiths, the UN's under-secretary-general for Humanitarian Affairs, called for attempts to sideline the largest humanitarian organization in Gaza — the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) — to stop.
He called UNRWA "the backbone of the humanitarian operation in Gaza" and added in his post on X that "any effort to distribute aid without them is simply doomed to fail." He added, "No other agency has the same reach, experience or community trust needed to do the job."