For days now, most of Gaza has been experiencing power cuts for up to eight hours a day – intensive care units included.

Although hospitals are outfitted with generators, one facility has already used up a third of their reserves from just one night after an air strike on the local grid.

Israel’s Operation Protective Edge, which began on 8 July 2014, has had a devastating impact on the al-Shifa hospital, Gaza’s largest public facility with 720 beds.

“We lack all essentials,” said administrative director Dr Subhi Sheikh, 58, who told Equal Times that local people are now donating money out of their own pockets so that the hospitals can buy medical essentials.

“Two weeks before the war we felt the shortage of medications from the market,” said Basman Alashi, 57, who is the director of the el-Wafa orthopaedic hospital, also in Gaza.

But administrators have neither the money to buy medicines, nor access to the medicines they so desperately need.

Banks have now been closed for several days and due to a lack of cash, couple with the lack of imports stemming from Israel’s economic blockade against Palestine dating back to 2006, there are not enough reserves in the region’s pharmacies to purchase stockpiles.

“We have supplies of medications for two weeks more. After we will have to ask the United Nations Relief and Works Agency or the World Health Organisation to supply us,” said Alashi who noted the hospital needs 127 listed medicines which are currently banned from import.

Already unable to treat non-essential patients, el-Wafa hospital recently made the difficult decision to discharge all non-critical patients.

“We used to have 30 patients but once the conflict started we evaluated every patient and we trained the families of the ones who could provide treatment at home,” Alashi continued.

Now el-Wafa has just 14 patients.

El-Wafa is also reeling from a missile launched into its fourth floor last Friday.

Four ‘warning rockets’, Israel’s system of using light artillery to warn civilians to flee, took out part of a wall.

Hours later the entire room exploded. Fortunately, all of the patients had been moved to the first floor.

Underlying economic crisis

Yet Gaza’s medical crisis began two months before Operation Protective Edge began, which has killed over 200 Palestinians – 80 per cent of which were civilians according to the United Nations – and destroyed more than 10,000 homes over the past week.

Healthcare was teetering on collapse after the unity government between the West Bank bound Fatah, and Gaza-based Hamas was formed on 2 June 2014.

The most recent economic problems began when the new government suspended incomes for thousands of Palestinians paid through Hamas nearly two months ago.

Meanwhile Gaza-based employees of the Palestinian Authority (PA) continued to be paid their salaries, some while suspended from work.

But because half of the public sector was being paid and the other half was not, Alashi said this led to an increase tensions, in some cases physical confrontations inside of banks.

Dr Sheikh said Israel’s recent air strikes had merely compounded an already dire situation. Everything, he said, from “social, economic and health” was already at breaking point – “and that’s in a ‘normal’ situation. Now we are in war.”

In 2000, well-before the Palestinian government in Gaza split from the now Fatah-ruled West Bank, only 10 per cent of the population was on food assistance.

Today 80 per cent of Palestinians in Gaza receive food aid. In the past year alone, prices have increased 300 per cent, according to a recent report.

Like his fellow employees at al-Shifa, Dr Sheikh hasn’t been paid in two months.

Yet he has worked around the clock in recent weeks, even sleeping at the hospital. “We are doing are best. We cannot compromise, but we need support,” he said.