The leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Yahya Sinouar, has tested positive for Covid-19, which is expanding rapidly in this impoverished Palestinian territory, the armed Islamist movement said on Tuesday (December 1st).
Read also: Covid-19: situation "out of control" in Gaza, curfew in the West Bank
“
Yayha Sinouar, the head of Hamas's political bureau in the Gaza Strip, tested positive for coronavirus today.
His state of health is good and he is working as usual but in isolation,
”said Hazem Qassem, the group's spokesperson.
The top leader joins a list of political leaders infected with the coronavirus and including Saleh Al-Arouri, a Hamas executive, and Saeb Erakat, secretary general of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) who died in November in Jerusalem after have contracted the virus.
Yahya Sinouar's infection comes at a time when the Gaza Strip is experiencing a peak in contamination with the new coronavirus.
A small, densely populated territory of two million people, and under Israeli blockade, the Gaza Strip closed its borders at the start of the pandemic and received a limited number of people who were to spend three weeks in quarantine centers.
Until mid-August, Gaza had recorded only a hundred cases of contamination.
But in the last two weeks, the health situation has deteriorated in the enclave with now 21,461 cases identified, including 111 deaths, and around 700 to 800 new cases per day.
The health situation is getting "
out of control
" in the Gaza Strip, medical and political sources warned last week.
"
The number of intensive care beds is very limited, as are the drugs
", alarmed Mahmoud Al-Khazindar, director of a private hospital in Gaza.
"
If the number of cases increases, a choice will have to be made between the care provided to the elderly, to young people and to patients with another disease,
" he warned.