WANA (Jul 27) – In an urgent letter addressed to international organizations, Dr. Mohammad Reza Zafarghandi, Iran’s Minister of Health, Treatment, and Medical Education, has called for an immediate, coordinated, and decisive humanitarian intervention to halt the ongoing human catastrophe in the Gaza Strip.

 

Expressing deep sorrow over the dire situation in Gaza, Dr. Zafarghandi emphasized that the scale and deliberate targeting of destruction inflicted upon the civilian population—especially women and children—has surpassed the threshold of a humanitarian crisis.

 

He described the collapse of Gaza’s public health system as a “deliberate dismantling of the very foundation of human life,” and urged the global community to respond to what he termed “collective punishment, ethnic cleansing, and an unfolding genocide.”

 

Highlighting the worsening conditions for civilians, Zafarghandi noted that many infants are dying in their mothers’ arms due to severe malnutrition and dehydration. According to statistics cited in the letter, over 32 percent of children under the age of two are suffering from acute malnutrition—marking the fastest-recorded onset of famine in documented history.

Dr. Mohammad Reza Zafarghandi, Iran’s Minister of Health, Treatment, and Medical Education. Social media/ WANA News Agency

The Minister also drew attention to the unimaginable suffering of women under siege, stating that mothers are being forced to endure stillbirths and miscarriages in bombed-out medical facilities without anesthesia, electricity, or even clean water. Many women, he said, are unable to breastfeed due to anemia and starvation, left to witness the slow death of their newborns.

 

Denouncing the use of famine as a weapon of war, Dr. Zafarghandi reported that families are now forced to survive on grass, animal feed, and inedible substances, while humanitarian aid is being deliberately blocked or destroyed. Deaths from starvation, he warned, have already exceeded the confirmed hundreds.

 

In the concluding sections of the letter, the Minister strongly condemned the actions of the Israeli occupying forces and called on the international community to take immediate steps, including:

  • Deployment of field hospitals and nutrition crisis response teams in cooperation with international partners
  • Facilitating UN humanitarian flights to deliver therapeutic food for infants
  • Adoption and enforcement of binding resolutions by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation to lift blockades on food, medicine, and equipment
  • Allocation of emergency financial and logistical resources within the next 48 hours for life-saving interventions

 

“Every hour of delay claims innocent lives,” Zafarghandi wrote, “and each day of hesitation buries another child in the ground.”

 

He concluded by emphasizing that this is not merely a plea—it is a moral, human, and professional duty dictated by conscience, humanity, and international law.

 

“We must respond,” he added, “not as politicians constrained by expediency, but as doctors and human beings entrusted with the sacred duty of protecting human life.”