Gaza Herald – Gaza’s Health Ministry warned Sunday that the territory’s medical laboratory system is approaching complete collapse, with 52 percent of laboratory equipment destroyed and much of what remains deteriorating, repeatedly breaking down and operating without essential spare parts.
The ministry said the crisis threatens one of the foundations of medical care in Gaza: doctors’ ability to diagnose illnesses, monitor patients and make treatment decisions across hospital departments.
In an urgent statement, the ministry said Gaza’s medical laboratories are facing an “unprecedented collapse” in essential capabilities and lack some of the most basic requirements needed to continue operating.
Chemical-testing devices are among the most critically needed pieces of equipment, the ministry said, describing them as a backbone of everyday medical care.
According to the ministry, 52 percent of Gaza’s total laboratory equipment has been destroyed and is now completely out of service.
The equipment that survived is also increasingly at risk.
Around 30 percent of the remaining laboratory devices are deteriorated and suffer frequent breakdowns, while essential spare parts needed to repair and maintain them are unavailable.
The ministry warned that these machines could therefore stop operating completely and without warning.
For patients, the consequences extend far beyond damaged equipment.
Laboratory tests are essential for diagnosing disease, monitoring patients’ conditions and determining treatment across medical departments. As machines disappear from service, doctors lose some of the basic diagnostic tools needed to understand what is happening inside a patient’s body and decide how to treat them.
The ministry said Gaza urgently needs modern laboratory equipment to replace what has been destroyed, as well as spare parts to prevent surviving machines from breaking down permanently.
It warned that the laboratory crisis cannot be treated simply as a logistical problem because the disappearance of diagnostic capabilities directly affects doctors’ ability to provide care and places patients’ lives at risk.
The ministry called for immediate intervention to allow new laboratory equipment and necessary spare parts into Gaza before surviving laboratory services cease functioning altogether.
The warning adds another layer to the continuing deterioration of Gaza’s health system, where hospitals are already struggling with shortages of medicines, medical consumables, equipment and replacement parts.
In a separate recent warning, the Health Ministry reported that 52 percent of essential medicines were at zero stock, along with 71 percent of medical consumables and 70 percent of laboratory consumables.
The latest warning shows that Gaza’s laboratory crisis now extends from the materials needed to perform tests to the machines needed to process them.
With more than half of laboratory equipment already destroyed and nearly a third of what remains deteriorated, the ministry warned that Gaza risks losing another fundamental component of medical care: the ability to diagnose patients before doctors can even begin treating them.
