‘We’re seeing children with knees missing, with large chunks taken out of their faces’: British surgeon in Gaza
We’ve spoken to Victoria Rose, a British consultant plastic surgeon who has gone to work in Gaza several times since the start of the war.
Speaking to Al Jazeera from London, the doctor described her time spent at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, in May and June as “relentless”.
“When we were there, we were operating every day without a break for the 24 days; I was averaging about 12 patients a day and my colleagues had separate operating lists,” Rose said.
“The bulk of what we saw initially was all bomb blast injuries and then in the latter part of the trip we started to see a lot of the gunshot wounds from the GHF shootings,” she added.
“What we’re seeing now is that the population is displaced and everybody is living in tents and this is where the bombs are going off – so there is no protection,” Rose continued, describing the traumatic injuries caused by the bombardment as “much more severe”.
“So we were seeing children with knees missing, with feet missing, with hands missing, with large chunks taken out of their faces; really, really significant injuries that many of them didn’t survive.”
Aftermath of Israeli attacks on tents for displaced Palestinians in Khan Younis
Starvation taking ‘absolutely huge’ toll on Gaza’s wounded
Asked about the long-term struggles faced by the thousands of wounded people and what care they would have, Victoria Rose replied that “there really is no way” that these patients can be rehabilitated under the current circumstances.
“There’s virtually no infrastructure left; I think 69 percent of all buildings in Gaza have been destroyed and 94 percent of all hospitals have been completely or partially destroyed – and that will include all the physiotherapy centres,” she told Al Jazeera.
Rose also said that most patients actually need secondary surgery.
“A lot of what we do when we are out there is the limb-saving injuries, so cleaning the wounds and getting them closed – but a lot of that involves shortening bones, performing operations that will need a second part to restore function.
“And that really is the worry, is that there are lots of people already waiting for those surgeries and we just don’t know where they are and we don’t have the facilities to operate on them.”
Commenting on the deepening starvation across Gaza, Rose said the toll this takes on the people trying to recover from this kind of injuries is “absolutely huge”.
“The pictures that we are seeing now are showing very late-stage malnutrition which is basically un-survivable from,” she said, explaining that infection rates “are soaring” as people suffering from malnutrition gradually lose the ability to mount immune responses.
“Coupled with the fact that aid is not getting in in any form – so not only are we not seeing adequate food supplies, we are not seeing adequate medical supplies, and certainly when we were there in June we did not have the antibiotics that we required to fight these sort of infections – so it compounds the problem.
“The malnutrition, the lack of aid – it’s making these injuries un-survivable.”
Many Palestinians too weak to travel on foot to aid sites, aid group says
The Danish Refugee Council (DRC) says that 70 percent of Palestinians in Gaza are suffering from “extreme weakness caused by starvation” making it difficult to access aid.
“The physical exhaustion is so profound that many are unable to make the long journey on foot to distribution sites or carry heavy loads even if they receive assistance,” the DRC said, as it released the findings of a survey of Palestinians in Deir el-Balah, Khan Younis, Gaza City and North Gaza.
Of the 39 people DRC interviewed between May 22 and July 27, 46 percent said they received clean drinking water twice a week at their current locations.
Twenty-eight percent said they could get a hot meal from a communal kitchen just once a week, but 31 percent said they had received no services in the month before being interviewed.
The interviewees said they “witnessed people, including family members, being deliberately targeted, shot, and killed by soldiers” when they went to access aid, at what the DRC called a “militarised backed distribution scheme”.
Because of the violence, people described the aid as “blood aid” or “aid soaked in blood”, the DRC added.
