GAZA has suffered a “complete healthcare collapse”, according to doctors who work in the devastated Palestinian region.
Two doctors who have worked in Gazan hospitals over the past 14 months spoke at a press conference in London on Thursday and detailed the horrors they witnessed working in the region.
Mohamed Ashraf, a doctor based in the north of the strip, showed photographs of colleagues who had been killed in Israel’s bombardment of the region.
He revealed that his work has kept him away from his family – and how he had resorted to calling other hospitals to make sure they had not been admitted as patients.
Speaking about his young daughter, Ashraf said: “She started to speak her first few words, she started to walk her first few steps and I wasn’t there, because I was at the hospital.
“I know nothing about her or her mum. Sometimes I try calling other hospitals in the south asking, have you received these names as dead bodies, or as casualties? Then I can know if they have been attacked.”
Mahim Qureshi, a London-based doctor who has been out to Gaza, said she was unprepared for the “scale” of the suffering she encountered while volunteering in the strip earlier this year.
She described seeing neurosurgeons forced to drill a hole into the head of a girl younger than 10 because of a lack of equipment.
Qureshi said: “There are some things, however, that one cannot prepare for. For me it was the number of children that I saw, that I treated and that were, within the hospital, severely injured.
"I remember in particular, a young girl who must’ve been eight or nine years old who was brought in by the neurosurgeons and she had been shot through the right side of the head. She was completely paralysed on the left side of her body, she was barely semi-conscious.”
A surgeon was “doing his best to save her”, she said. “But there are no saws or drills that are now allowed into Gaza and I don’t know if you can imagine what it is like to drill into the head of a child when you do not have a saw available.”
She said that the region’s healthcare system had collapsed and doctors were unable to do basic things to ensure patients’ safety, like ensuring that operating theatres were sterile.
Qureshi added: “I was prepared for the gruesome war injuries as best I could be that I might see there.
“What I perhaps hadn’t prepared myself for were the consequences of complete healthcare collapse and the patients that were presenting extremely late with injuries and with illnesses that months earlier would have been entirely treatable. These people could not be saved.”
Qureshi described working at the Al-Aqsa hospital, which she said was taking as many as 1000 patients, despite originally being built to hold around 150 people.
Doctors had to line hospital beds with body bags, she said.
Qureshi added: “I noticed that people seemed to feel much colder than I did, it was April and the temperature was in the mid-20s, but they were wearing as many layers as they could and I realised before long that this was because they were extremely hungry.”
The vascular surgeon said the infection rate for patients recovering from surgery was “approaching 100%” and that people “no longer have the reserves to fight basic infections” because of malnutrition.
Patients were being treated in dangerous and potentially deadly environments because of a “lack of hygiene”, overcrowding and a lack of cleaning products and equipment.
After her stint in the spring, Qureshi returned to Gaza this October and described seeing the effects of malnutrition first-hand.
She said: “I noticed that everyone, particularly children, their hair had turned much lighter. This was a consequence of protein malnutrition, starvation and deprivation.”
Gaza’s broken healthcare system, which Israel has been accused of deliberately crippling as a “weapon of war”, could kill more people than the military onslaught, the British Red Cross has warned.
Pregnant women are being forced to give birth in filthy environments like tents or even in the street, which risks potentially deadly infections. A lack of incubators means premature babies are also more likely to die.
Last month, the United Nations warned there was an “imminent” risk of famine developing in the north of the strip.
Israel’s destruction of civilian infrastructure “contributes directly to the famine risk”, according to Ilze Brands Kehris, the UN’s assistant secretary-general for human rights.
She noted that the “use of starvation of the civilian population as a method of warfare is strictly prohibited under international humanitarian law” and added: “The manner in which the Israeli military is conducting operations in northern Gaza suggests not only that Israel’s actions are seeking to empty northern Gaza of Palestinians, by displacing survivors to the south, but points to further grave risks of atrocities of the most serious nature.”
