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Palestinian girl with burns from Israeli shelling hopes for treatment
The disfiguring facial burns of 10-year-old Hanan Akel show how Israel’s military campaign in Gaza is not only causing thousands of deaths but terrible injuries afflicting both old and young.
Hanan lies in a hospital cot in Deir el-Balah in the central Gaza Strip, struggling to move her mouth as she speaks with her eyes partly shut, patches of her forehead still raw and stitched scars across her nose and lips.
When her mother Walaa Akel tried to clean her, she wailed.
Hanan Akel, who suffers from burn injuries from an Israeli raid, lies at Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir el-Balah, central Gaza
Hanan was out walking in Bureij refugee camp where the family had taken shelter after leaving their home when she was caught in Israeli shellfire, her mother Walaa told Reuters.
Instead of spending the Eid al-Adha festival playing with friends, she has spent it in the Al-Aqsa Hospital being treated for second- and third-degree burns on her face and limbs. Now she hopes for treatment and for her face to heal. “I want to go back to what I was like before,” she said.
Doctor Mahmoud Mahani, the plastic surgeon treating Hanan at the hospital, said she needs urgent treatment somewhere with more advanced equipment.
Walaa Akel said her daughter used to be “as beautiful as the moon”. Now, Hanan often wants to look at videos and pictures of what her face was like before. “She says to me, ‘Mama, I wish I could walk. Mama, I wish I could stand. I wish I could play with my siblings,'” Walaa said.
Zero supplies in hospital means reusing disposables: Paediatric surgeon
General paediatric surgeon Jamal Mari, who has been working at Al-Ahli Hospital in Deir el-Balah as part of a medical mission from Australia, says he was not allowed to bring any medical supplies into the besieged enclave.
“There are zero supplies. We are just depending on whatever [supplies are] left over from [previous] missions,” he told Al Jazeera from outside the hospital. “Whatever disposables we have, we keep reusing and reusing them, which is not safe at all.”
“They’ve got five rooms [in the hospital] which they say are operating theatres, but honestly they’re just little cubicles re-fashioned and done as theatres,” he said. “I don’t understand how they’re managing.”
Infants suffering from severe burns throughout their bodies: Surgeon in Gaza
Bushra Othman, who also arrived in Gaza as part of a medical mission from Australia, says most of the patients being affected are “exceptionally young kids, women and children”.
“Some of the injuries we saw yesterday [at Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir el-Balah] are shrapnel and blast injuries from explosions, massive chest wounds, esophageal and lung injuries, major abdominal trauma,” she told Al Jazeera.
Othman added that infants as young as 18 months old are being killed in explosions, or have severe burns throughout their bodies.
“None of these patients can go to the intensive care unit to get appropriate treatment because the hospital is understaffed, undersupplied and there’s just not enough to go around in terms of resources,” she said.
