Dr Mohammed Abu Mughaisib is the deputy medical coordinator for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in Palestine. His work covers Nablus, the West Bank, Jerusalem and Gaza.
Tell me about the work that you do.
Things keep changing. We are always opening things and closing things. Last December, we opened a field hospital in Rafah, for example. We had an operating room, 60-bed capacity, an outpatient clinic for treating patients with trauma and burns. Unfortunately, we had to evacuate the hospital this May. We’d already had to evacuate from Khan Younis in February when there was a military operation there. Same as in Gaza – we had to evacuate from al-Shifa hospital in April. Now we are only active in Nasser hospital [in Khan Younis]. We have two operating rooms and one outpatient clinic. Since we opened two months ago there has been full occupancy. We discharge one patient and we admit five.
We also have a clinic on the west coastal side of Khan Younis, which provides primary healthcare and women’s healthcare for the internally displaced people there. We have partially restarted activities in Gaza City in the north. We have some remaining staff there, about 20 Palestinian nationals who didn’t want to leave Gaza after the evacuation order. They really suffered a lot. They went through a period of starvation. Now they are stuck, and we have opened a clinic that provides dressing and physiotherapy for trauma and burn patients.
