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‘Situation really dire, we’re running out of everything’: Doctor
We’ve spoken to Victoria Rose, a consultant plastic surgeon who, having worked at Nasser and European hospitals last year, returned to Gaza a few days ago. Here’s what she said about what she’s encountered at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis:
“The conditions are very different from when we visited last year, both in the medical supplies that we have, but also in the state of the population.
“When we drove in, the state of the landscape hadn’t changed hugely. We were last here in August, and by that stage, I think most of the buildings had already been flattened, so we were driving past the same piles of rubble that we’d driven past before.
“But the real difference when we came to Nasser was the lack of supplies.
“We haven’t had any medical or food aid into the country now for 76 days, so we are relying on NGOs trading their surpluses with each other – to the extent that yesterday we sent a team back to the European Gaza Hospital, which was bombed earlier this week, to see if they can scavenge any of our instruments and medical supplies.
“Some NGOs have a little bit more items than others, so there is some trading going on for what you’ve got a little bit more of, so that you can get something that you’ve got nothing of – but it really is small-level bartering just to keep us going for a little bit longer.
“It’s really dire and we’re running out of basically everything that we’ve had.”
‘This is unnecessary deaths of children’
“We had a young girl yesterday that came in. She’d been run over by a truck. She had quite significant injuries, and she passed away later that evening of overwhelming sepsis,” Rose said.
“Now that child would have survived in the UK because we would have the facilities on our paediatric intensive care unit to support her systemically. We don’t have any of that here. This is unnecessary deaths of children.”
She also said the lack of access to food and clean water due to the Israeli blockade has been hitting the children “a lot harder”.
“You can see that in the population as you walk through the streets. The children are all underweight, they’re very small, they’re very cachectic. The adults have coped slightly better, but all of my colleagues that I know that were here with me in August all look a lot thinner than they did when I last saw them.”
Rose noted that “the real issue” is the inability of the body to heal due to the lack of certain vitamins, minerals and sustained nutrition.
“You’re also far more susceptible to infection, and that’s the problem that we’re seeing. We are bringing people back day after day with unhealed wounds and advancing infections, and life-threatening sepsis is what is killing the patients at the moment.”
She added: “It gets harder every time you lose a child. It’s not something that you get used to. It makes you very angry that this is still going on.”
North Gaza’s Indonesian Hospital out of service: Health Ministry
The Israeli military’s intensified siege of the Indonesian Hospital and its surroundings has taken it out of service, the ministry says on Telegram.
The ministry added that all the public hospitals in northern Gaza are now out of service after the destruction of Beit Hanoon Hospital and Kamal Adwan Hospital.
Anyone who moves at Indonesian Hospital being shot at, hospital director says
More details are emerging about the Israeli bombing of the Indonesian Hospital in northern Gaza.
The hospital’s director, Marwan al-Sultan, said the facility is now under siege and anyone who moves is being shot at. Even the intensive care unit has taken gunfire, he said, calling the situation “catastrophic”.
He said the hospital can no longer provide services and called on international organisations to press for medical teams’ safety.
Not only is the Israeli military using heavy artillery and heavy machine guns, but it is deploying quadcopters. These sky predators are roaming around the health facility, intimidating the medical staff and patients.
What we are seeing is an aerial siege of the hospital. No one can get in. No injured people are able to be transported there. Everyone inside is trying to survive these difficult conditions.
Gaza’s health authorities call for blood donations
Gaza City’s al-Shifa Hospital, the largest in the enclave, is “in an urgent and dire need for blood donations of all blood types”, according to a statement on the Health Ministry’s Telegram channel.
This is “due to the severe shortage in the blood bank’s stock due to the current circumstances”, it said, referring to the recent intensified Israeli strikes across the Strip.
