Egypt says no limit to number of patients it will accept from Gaza

Egypt sees no upper limit to the admission and treatment of injured people from the embattled Gaza Strip for the time being.

The head of the hospital in al-Arish, near the border crossing, has told journalists.

Ahmed Mansur said on Wednesday that Egypt was prepared to accept any injured people as long as they could reach the Rafah border crossing.

He added that other hospitals were also still prepared to admit Palestinians.

Egypt’s health minister, Khalid Abdel Ghaffar, had already stated that all injured people travelling to the country would be treated.

“We are ready to treat all medical cases that come through the Rafah border crossing, but the Israeli side is controlling their numbers,’’ he said recently.

Since the border was reopened on Oct. 21, around 150 injured people from the sealed-off Palestinian coastal area have crossed it, according to Egyptian figures.

Among them were people with broken bones, severe burns, injured organs and severed limbs, Mr Mansur said.

The number of injured people treated in Egypt is negligible compared to the number of those wounded in the Gaza Strip.

According to an information office in the Hamas-controlled administration, the number of Palestinians killed there has risen to 11,500, while 29,000 people have been injured since the war began on October 7.

The information could not initially be independently confirmed.

The war started when militants from Hamas and other organisations attacked Israel, leaving around 1,200 dead.

They took about 240 people as hostages back to Gaza.

(dpa/NAN)