The region’s 22 countries and territories include Iran and the Gulf states, as well as Gaza, Sudan, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

“The situation has been quite difficult for some time, but what we’re seeing today is just an actual regional health crisis unfolding in real time in multiple parts of this region,” Balkhy told the Guardian. “It’s not just about lives being lost. It’s about a collapse of access [to healthcare] in many, many dimensions way above and beyond what we would have imagined.”

The US-Israel war on Iran has killed more than 1,000 people in Lebanon, over 1,500 in Iran and 16 in Israel, according to each country’s authorities, with more than a dozen deaths reported in the West Bank and Gulf Arab states.

People with chronic illnesses were seeing treatment disrupted by hospital closures and “the uprooting and displacement of people where, within less than one month, 3.2 million have been displaced from their homes in Iran and more than 1 million in Lebanon”, Balkhy said.

The harms of conflicts across the region, she said, would be long-term even after open hostilities ceased. She said she was concerned about the effects on maternal mortality and mental health, as well as children left orphaned and without education.