An Israeli strike destroyed a nutrition supply warehouse near Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahiya, northern Gaza, overnight into Tuesday, Al Jazeera reports.
The warehouse was run by Ard El Insan, working with Medical Aid for Palestinians, and held supplies for children, pregnant women and breastfeeding mothers. It served about 60 medical points and up to 100 women and children a day.
MAP said: "The force of the explosion caused large sections of the building to collapse, including the roof and walls, completely burying supplies beneath the rubble." The entire stock was rendered unfit for human consumption.
What is lost when a nutrition store is lost
Therapeutic feeding supplies are not interchangeable with general food aid. They are formulated for severely malnourished children and for women whose own nutrition determines whether an infant is fed, and they arrive through a supply chain that in Gaza is slow and frequently interrupted.
Sahar Salem, a project coordinator at Ard El Insan, put the practical consequence plainly: "Losing these quantities in their entirety is a major blow to our work and will undoubtedly affect our ability to reach the children and women who need these services."
The sixty medical points are the reason this is more than one building. A warehouse is a distribution hub, and its destruction subtracts from every point it supplied.
The night's toll
Medical sources reported seven Palestinians killed: three in a strike on a home in Beit Lahiya, according to a source at al-Shifa Hospital; one in a drone strike in al-Mawasi, Khan Younis; and three who died of wounds from earlier raids in Khan Younis.
Those figures come from medical sources in Gaza, which is how casualty reporting there works and which we state each time.
A second shortage
Munir al-Bursh, director-general of the Gaza health ministry, warned about oxygen: 12 of roughly 34 stations remain operational.
Oxygen is not a treatment for one condition. It is what makes surgery, intensive care and neonatal care possible at all, so a two-thirds reduction in supply capacity constrains everything a hospital does.
What we could not establish
We could not establish whether the Israeli military has commented on the warehouse strike or given a reason for it, the quantity of supplies destroyed, whether anyone was inside, or the identities of those killed. We verified this account from a single publication, and the Israeli military's account is absent from it.
