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Nearly 650 patients forced from Al-Aqsa Hospital: MSF
Doctors Without Borders, also known by its French acronym MSF, says it has set up a field hospital in central Gaza’s Deir el-Balah after Israeli evacuation orders forced nearly 650 patients from Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital.
Before the evacuation order, an MSF doctor said the hospital, now nearly empty, was so full that some patients had to receive treatment on the floor.
“MSF’s field hospital, which wasn’t scheduled to open until September, started receiving its first patients amid a severe lack of supplies and resources and is facing huge pressure as the other remaining hospitals in the area are under threat,” MSF said in a news release.
“It was designed to be complementary and to provide support for other larger hospitals like Al-Aqsa. Field hospitals are not a solution, but a last resort in response to Israel’s dismantling of the health care system.”
‘We need source control,’ physician says after working in Gaza
Dr Tammy Abughnaim, an emergency physician, says that since her first visit to Gaza in March, Israeli forces have made conditions in the enclave “orders of magnitude worse”.
The doctor, who recently returned to Chicago after three weeks at Gaza’s Nasser Hospital, told Al Jazeera that the hospital’s emergency department also handles the vast majority of non-trauma related issues revolved around displacement — heat exhaustion, dehydration, skin lesions and infections, poor wound healing, and malnutrition, she said.
“Israel has made it impossible for doctors to offer solutions to any of these problems by actively preventing any substantial aid from entering Gaza,” she said. “Our WHO [World Health Organization] delegation was told by Israeli authorities that we could not bring medical supplies with us, just one bag of our personal belongings, and that violation of this absurd new rule would result in the rejection of the entire emergency medical team.”
Abughnaim, who was part of an emergency medical team organised by Medical Aid for Palestinians and the International Red Cross, called for an immediate ceasefire and arms embargo on Israel, saying it is “the only safeguard for civilian life in Gaza”.
