Channel 4 News Menu
2 Aug 2014

Gaza: health crisis looms for trapped civilians

Overnight Israel punished the town of Rafah, 30 kilometres south of Gaza, relentlessly. It’s where the Israeli soldier Hadar Goldin went missing on Friday after an ambush by Hamas forces.

In the past 24 hours, more than 60 people have died there, according to the health ministry. The only acute hospital was evacuated after a shell hit the entrance of its emergency room.

At the Shifa hospital in Gaza City doctors are struggling.

Everywhere you go people have built tents out of sheets and wood; I saw a cheeky kid rig the drips from the hospital’s air-conditioning vent into what I’m hoping is a fresh water supply, using a piece of plastic coving he’d scavenged from a skip.

Doctors here are struggling not just with emergencies, but with a backlog of essential operations. I met Anas Al-Borsh, a law student, whose leg was ripped by shrapnel during an F16 strike on a nearby house. The bone is exposed and he’s been waiting for treatment for eight days.

A few minutes later, he’s on the operating table. The doctor is Ghassan Abu-Sitta, a British Palestinian volunteer. An eminent plastic surgeon, the Israelis delayed his entry to Gaza for two weeks.

He fiddles with the ultrasound machine he’s using to find the artery. It’s dodgy. “It’s been donated,” he shrugs. “You have to use what’s there. The scalpels have been used maybe 15 times.”

Dr Abu-Sitta tells me there are two pressing problems: “First, there are 7,500 injured and we can’t move them out of Gaza. Second, we can’t get people out of hospital and into home care because 250,000 people are homeless. You can’t send somebody with an open wound to one of these makeshift camps. The system is in gridlock. I give it days…”

Dr Abu-Sitta, who trained in Britain but now heads the plastic surgery unit at the American University of Beirut Medical Centre, adds: “We’ve tried to evacuate some of the patients to other hospitals. But they’re overflowing. Plus we had to evacuate an unfinished wing of Shifa, we were using as overflow, because the Israelis threatened to bomb it.”

This threat was confirmed to us yesterday by a senior manager at the hospital.

There are 31 intensive care beds in Gaza, 14 of them here. While I’m at Shifa, two ambulances arrive: a father and his son, hit by a tank shell in their home. It’s quickly clear they won’t be needing intensive care: their wounds are sickening, their bodies lifeless.

Medical Aid for Palestinians, who brought the doctor here, has been trying to train both doctors and paramedics.

“One time in nine do you get into Gaza to do the training you want to do,” Dr Abu-Sitta says.

He’s designed a masters course in plastic surgery, which the Gazan doctors had to take via Skype.

At Shifa,  I meet three year old Ahmed, hit by fragments of the shell that hit the UNWRA camp at Beit Hanoun. His mum sleeps at his bedside. Their home is destroyed.

But there is worse. For Palestinians, the extended family is the lifeline. But, says the surgeon, around 30 or 40 families have been wiped out completely. There are children in intensive care who have literally nobody to care for them if they recover.

In most disasters, the question is: what do you need? Here it’s pointless. Israel and Egypt limit access for experts in and casualties out.

For the record they need an x-ray machine at Shifa: one of the two they have is broken. They need operating sets. They need high quality needles, not blunt ones. They need specialist surgeons and intensive care nurses. Any paramedic who gets here has to be prepared to be killed in their ambulance. Three so far have been hit by Israeli shells.

Above all they need a strategic solution: to end the siege and blockade. This is the only major conflict in the world where the civilian population cannot escape.

Dr Abu-Sitta fights back the anger as he tells me: “It’s the sense of impunity the Israelis have. The international community’s failure to act has convinced them they can kill civilians. They are drunk on impunity. If people watching this ask: what can I do? Pressure your government to stop supporting the Israelis.”

Today the death toll stands at 1,635.

If the public health system collapses, without a major inward flow of emergency relief, killer epidemics are a real danger.

Follow @paulmasonnews on Twitter.

Topics

,,