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Gaza hospitals inundated with patients suffering from injuries to multiple parts of the body
Waseem Saeed, a UK-based plastic and reconstructive surgeon who recently returned from his third humanitarian mission to Gaza, says there are “multiple mass casualty” events occurring in the war-ravaged coastal enclave.
“Previously, we would see them on a steady basis, but this time, particularly towards the end of my mission, every day there would be people coming in with horrific injuries, sometimes twice a day,” he told Al Jazeera.
He said treating the wounded was far more complex than most imagine, noting they had “multiple sites of injuries”.
“They have blast injuries to their lungs. They may have a head injury at the same time, they have abdominal or chest injuries. They almost always have limb injuries, amputations, partial amputations, and are often covered in shrapnel and frequently burned as well,” he said.
“Now each of those patients is going to require multiple specialities operating on them at different times, often several hours of surgery.”
Malnutrition hindering recovery for Palestinians
UK-based surgeon Waseem Saeed expressed deep concern over the dire medical and nutritional shortages faced by Palestinians and medics alike. According to him, food plays a critical role in recovery, stating “the most important medical supply is nutrition”.
“It’s pointless operating on people if they’re not going to heal. And what you now have is a year and a half plus of people on very poor diets, very little nutritional food,” he told Al Jazeera.
“I consider myself a reasonable plastic surgeon, but I’d be lucky if I got 50 percent take on some of the skin grafts.
“You take stitches out at the normal time, and the wounds start to open up, so you have to put them back in. We are seeing the effects of this very poor state of nutrition,” he added.
Only 17 hospitals in Gaza partially operational: Health ministry
The director-general of the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza, Munir al-Bursh, has spoken to Al Jazeera about the healthcare situation in the war-ravaged coastal enclave.
- There are only 17 hospitals in Gaza that are partially functioning today.
- Twenty percent of hospitals in Gaza are unable to provide ambulance services.
- The occupation arrested more than 360 of our medical personnel in Gaza.
Gaza Health Ministry says medical supplies level ‘catastrophic’
- Forty-seven percent of the essential medicine list has been depleted, as well as 65 percent of the medical consumables list.
- Only 30 primary care centres are currently operating out of 105.
- Fifty operating rooms are currently working, albeit in dire conditions, out of 104.
- Twenty-five oxygen stations out of a total of 34 have been destroyed, leaving only 9 partly operational.
- Seven MRI machines were destroyed, leaving the Gaza Strip without diagnostic MRI equipment.
- Forty-nine of 110 generators are operating in the Gaza Strip’s hospitals, and they urgently need maintenance and fuel supplies.
US doctor urges action to prevent ‘erasure’ of Palestinian people
Dr Feroze Sidhwa, a US-based physician who has volunteered at Gaza hospitals over the course of the war, says Israel is carrying out “the deliberate destruction” of the healthcare system in the enclave.
Speaking at the UN Security Council meeting in New York, Sidhwa said his patients in Gaza “were six-year-olds with shrapnel in their heart and bullets in their brains, and pregnant women whose pelvises had been obliterated”.
“Mothers sheltering in the hospital cooked bread on hotplates in the emergency department during mass casualty events as we dealt with the rain of fire and death falling around us everywhere,” said Sidhwa, who most recently volunteered at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis in March and April.
He stressed that the healthcare crisis in Gaza is “man-made” and “entirely preventable”.
“Participating in it or not, allowing it to happen is a choice. This is a deliberate denial of conditions necessary for life: food, shelter, water and medicine. Preventing genocide means refusing to normalise these atrocities,” he told the council.
