Emergency teams logged 317,624 chronic-disease visits in Gaza over two years

Emergency medical teams working in Gaza delivered 317,624 consultations for chronic, non-communicable diseases between January 2024 and December 2025, according to an analysis of the World Health Organization's Minimum Data Set reports published in Internal and Emergency Medicine [s1]. The number reframes a war usually counted in trauma: much of the medical work was routine management of hypertension, diabetes, asthma and chronic lung disease, cardiovascular disease and epilepsy, delivered to people whose ordinary care had nowhere else to go [s1].

That total is the headline, but the more useful finding is about how a broken health system divided the work — and what a companion study shows happening to the care that emergency teams cannot improvise.

What the data set can and cannot say

The study is an observational analysis of routinely collected, aggregate figures, not a clinical audit of individual patients [s1]. The WHO Minimum Data Set is what deployed emergency medical teams report as a condition of operating, so it captures the care those teams provided and nothing outside it — care delivered by Gaza's own surviving hospitals, or not delivered at all, is not in these numbers. Read correctly, 317,624 is a floor on chronic-disease need, not a measure of it.

Within that limit, the analysis sorted consultations across three team types: Type 1 mobile teams providing outpatient primary care on the move, Type 1 fixed teams providing it from a static site, and Type 2 teams providing inpatient and surgical care [s1]. The division of labour was not arbitrary. Type 1 mobile teams recorded the highest proportion of new diagnoses, consistent with a frontline case-detection role reaching people who had lost contact with the system; Type 1 fixed teams functioned more as chronic-disease management hubs; and Type 2 teams handled the highest share of acute exacerbations, at 87.6% [s1].

The ceasefire signal

One temporal pattern stands out. Consultation patterns varied across six predefined conflict phases, and non-communicable-disease visits rose during ceasefire periods [s1]. The plain reading is that when fighting paused, people who had been unable or unwilling to move sought the routine care they had been deferring — a surge of postponed need rather than a new outbreak of illness. It is the kind of signal that argues for building chronic-disease services into a humanitarian response early, which is the authors' own conclusion [s1].

Where improvisation runs out

Some chronic care cannot be delivered from a mobile clinic, and dialysis is the clearest case. A study in the Journal of Nephrology tracked what happened to Gaza's kidney-failure patients and found the total on dialysis fell from 1,022 in late 2022 to 750 in late 2024 — a decline that occurred even though new patients kept starting treatment over the same period, which means the fall understates how many were lost [s2]. The count was assembled by visiting centres directly or reaching them by phone and text, a method that reflects how fragile even the data collection had become [s2].

The capacity behind those patients shrank in step. The number of functioning dialysis machines dropped from 178 in 2022 to 109 in 2024, despite 35 new machines supplied through WHO [s2]. The paediatric picture is the starkest single detail: Al Rantisi hospital, the only facility providing children's dialysis before October 2023, is no longer functioning, and of the 38 children it once served, the surviving eight are now dialysed on adult machines in other centres [s2].

Reading the two together

The emergency-team data set and the dialysis study describe two ends of the same problem. Mobile and fixed teams can absorb an enormous volume of blood-pressure checks, insulin, inhalers and anticonvulsants — 317,624 consultations is real, sustained work [s1]. But they cannot manufacture dialysis chairs, functioning machines or a paediatric renal unit, and where the care depends on fixed infrastructure, the trend is loss [s2]. This is the chronic-disease layer beneath the acute crisis documented elsewhere in the region, from Sudan's collapsing dialysis and chronic-care system to Gaza's infectious-disease resurgence and the regional health appeal WHO built around it.

What to watch is whether the ceasefire-linked rebound in routine visits is matched by any recovery in the fixed capacity — dialysis machines, renal units, oxygen — that emergency teams cannot replace.

Sources

• [s1] Non-communicable disease care delivered by emergency medical teams during the Gaza Health Response in 2024–2025: an observational analysis of WHO Minimum Data Set Reports — Internal and Emergency Medicine. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11739-026-04483-y
• [s2] Dialysis and renal transplantation in Gaza: a crisis of access in a war zone — Journal of Nephrology. https://doi.org/10.1093/joneph/aajag161