Medical staff in Gaza are ‘beyond burned out’
Dr Bushra Othman, a general surgeon on a volunteer mission with the Palestinian Australian New Zealand Medical Association, spoke to Al Jazeera from Deir el-Balah.
Here is a summary of what she said:
- Healthcare workers and medical staff have been stretched thin beyond the endurance and limits of what any human should suffer through.
- Staff in operating theatres throughout hospitals in the Gaza Strip are working 19-24 hours a day, constantly dealing with injuries and fatalities, especially from these so-called aid distribution sites, where Israel is either firing or bombing people.
- This means healthcare workers are beyond burned out.
- Hospital staff members have had to unscrub because family members were brought in as killed or murdered.
- Patients will either die waiting to get into the operating theatres or will die from their illnesses because of the limited ability to give them good healthcare.
‘I’ll never forget the wailing of the father saying goodbye to his son’
Palestinians in Gaza are sometimes having to head to aid distribution sites in the middle of the night “to try to fight for whatever aid they can get,” says Dr Bushra Othman, a volunteer surgeon.
A “state of chaos” at the distribution sites exists because of the desperation of the people, the doctor with the Palestinian Australian New Zealand Medical Association told Al Jazeera from Deir el-Balah.
“We’re seeing gunshot wounds, either to the brain or to the chest … shrapnel injuries that are either piercing spinal cords and making people paraplegic.
“We had a 13-year-old boy the other day who’d had shrapnel injury through his brain, [that] tore through his right eye, pierced through his heart and shattered his intestines.
“I’ll never forget the wailing of the father saying goodbye to his son who passed away on the operating table.
“We’re seeing really horrific injuries in the emergency department, with gunshots coming in through the front of the face and going back, through the back of the mouth or the throat or the spinal cord again, and plenty of severely life-threatening abdominal injuries as well.
“In the clamour of all of the chaos, people are sometimes getting run over by either the cars or the trucks that are there. So we’re seeing limbs that are mangled and shattered. “On top of all of that, you’ve still got bombs going off, or you’ve got quacopters firing at people”, Othman said.
An injured boy and other mourners at a funeral for Palestinians killed by Israeli fire while trying to receive aid in central Gaza at al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City
More Gaza aid hub killings as GHF called ‘an abomination’
At least 60 Palestinians were killed while trying to get aid in Gaza in the past 24 hours.
More than 500 have been killed since the US-and-Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation took over distribution, a process condemned as a “death trap” by UN officials.
I’m in northern Gaza. I would rather starve than take GHF aid
It has been two months since I last ate bread. Food in the markets has been fading away since Israel blocked nearly all aid into Gaza on March 2.
Following the blockade, food prices skyrocketed. Sugar and flour vanished, fruits and vegetables became a rare sight, and only red lentils remained available in the markets.
Unlike many others who stored food during the January truce, fearing another harsh round of famine, my family and I made the risky decision not to store anything. We had previously done so but lost everything when Israeli soldiers reached our area with their tanks.
