Health & Healing
Gaza's Health Ministry halves dialysis sessions as machines fail
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
Roughly half the dialysis machines at Gaza's largest remaining kidney unit are out of service because a cheap consumable ran out, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported on 3 July.
OCHA said the Ministry of Health had reported a critical disruption to haemodialysis at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City caused by shortages of sodium bicarbonate, the buffer solution the machines cannot run without. About 25 of 52 machines — between 45 and 50 per cent — were out of service, OCHA said, reducing treatment capacity for some 240 patients with end-stage kidney disease. OCHA attributed the shortage to chronic underfunding.
To keep partial coverage, according to the same report, staff cut sessions from three a week to two, shortened each session from four hours to three, and added daily shifts. OCHA said patients were increasingly reporting fatigue and clinical deterioration.
Four weeks later, in its 31 July report, OCHA listed insulin, haemodialysis supplies, cardiac catheterisation materials and diagnostic and monitoring equipment among the shortages obstructing treatment of chronic disease in Gaza.
How many people are affected is itself disputed. The WHO Public Health Situation Analysis published in November 2025 cited the Health Ministry's figure of 700 dialysis patients in Gaza.
WHO's own situation report for January 2026 recorded four hospitals with an estimated 641 patients receiving haemodialysis on 134 machines, of whom 211 patients and 50 machines were at Al-Shifa, while noting the ministry's estimate that up to 1,100 people need regular haemodialysis.
The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, in a May 2025 report, counted 1,200 patients at stage five kidney failure requiring twelve hours of dialysis a week. No reconciled patient registry has been published, and the gap between those who receive dialysis and those assessed as needing it runs into the hundreds.
The mortality figures come from the ministry and from rights monitors rather than from an independent audit.
Health officials told the Associated Press in April 2025 that more than 400 dialysis patients, around 40 per cent of all dialysis cases in the territory, had died during the first 18 months of the war for lack of proper treatment, including 11 since the beginning of March 2025, when Israel sealed the territory to all imports.
WHO's November 2025 analysis repeated the ministry's 40 per cent estimate. Al Jazeera reported in July 2026 that PCHR put the toll above 470.
The treating infrastructure has shrunk. PCHR said in May 2025 that six of seven specialised renal dialysis centres had been destroyed. Al Jazeera reported in July 2026 that the number of hospitals equipped for kidney failure had fallen from seven to four, among them the destroyed Noura al-Kaabi Dialysis Centre.
Power is the second constraint.
OCHA reported in late February 2026 that 260 of Gaza's 619 health service points were functioning, 90 per cent of them only partially, and that all hospitals remained fully dependent on back-up generators, with delays in the entry of spare parts, uninterruptible power supplies, transformers and electrical components affecting intensive care, dialysis, operating theatres and laboratories.
WHO said it had continued supplying fuel to health facilities and ambulance providers through 2025. OCHA's 10 July report tied shortages of fuel, engine oil and generators both to funding shortfalls and to Israeli restrictions on what may enter.
For diabetes, no consolidated official count of insulin-dependent patients in Gaza has been published.
The Palestine Children's Relief Fund put the number of people with diabetes at about 71,000, including some 2,500 children with type 1 diabetes, and said Gaza required roughly 30,000 insulin units a month before October 2023, with power cuts, food shortages and displacement making safe storage and proper nutrition nearly impossible.
An endocrinologist, Adli al-Ghouti, told Al Jazeera in June 2026 that about 2,500 children with type 1 diabetes were in critical condition. Human Rights Watch reported in December 2023 that WHO had described an acute shortage of insulin, compounded by scarcity of test strips and clean water.
The advocacy group T1International, publishing interviews in February 2026, said patients in northern Gaza were rationing expired insulin without test strips or check-ups.
Physicians for Human Rights, in a November 2025 report, said cold chain equipment, oxygen generators and insulin pens had been repeatedly delayed or denied entry, that the criteria for restriction remain unpublished, and that items cleared by Israel's Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories were still sometimes blocked at the crossing.
COGAT's own public FAQ, updated in June 2026, lists insulin pens, dialysis machines and incubators among the supplies entering Gaza, and states that when a dual-use restriction is flagged the agency works with the requesting organisation to find approved alternatives meeting the same civilian need.
The alternatives that would reduce dependence on machines and mains power have not been established in Gaza.
A paper in Transplant International this year found that as of December 2025 Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, the strip's main functioning hospital, had no peritoneal dialysis option at all, for want of catheters, dialysis fluid and a reliable sterile environment, and was running 31 haemodialysis machines.
It noted that more than 100 living-donor kidney transplants had been performed in Gaza before October 2023 and that transplantation has since stopped.
Solar power for hospitals predates the war and was never built around dialysis.
WHO and the Japanese government inaugurated a 250-kilowatt-peak solar plant at Nasser Hospital in June 2019; the UN Development Programme installed 85 kilowatt-peak of photovoltaics serving units in four hospitals; Qatar Red Crescent fitted 498 panels at Al-Quds Hospital, cutting monthly generator and fuel costs by 40 per cent.
No published assessment of how much of that capacity survives has emerged, and OCHA's description of every hospital as fully generator-dependent indicates it is not carrying dialysis loads now.
OCHA's 31 July report does not say when the missing bicarbonate and haemodialysis consumables are expected to arrive, or whether the 25 idle machines at Al-Shifa will return to service.
