UN: Palestinians are dying in hospitals as estimated 60,000 wounded overwhelm doctors

UNITED NATIONS — Palestinians are dying every day in Gaza’s overwhelmed, remaining hospitals, which cannot cope with the tens of thousands of people injured during Israel’s military offensive, a UN health expert said on Wednesday, as a doctor from the International Rescue Committee assessed the situation called Gaza’s hospitals the biggest disaster. most extreme she had ever seen.

The two health workers, who recently left Gaza after weeks working in hospitals there, described overwhelmed doctors trying to save the lives of thousands of wounded amid collapsing hospitals that have turned into makeshift refugee camps.

Sean Casey of the World Health Organization, who recently left Gaza after five weeks of trying to get more staff and supplies to the area’s 16 partially functioning hospitals, told a UN press conference that he saw “a truly horrific situation in the hospitals” as the health system was collapsing day by day.

Al-Shifa Hospital, once Gaza’s main hospital with 700 beds, has been reduced to treating only emergency trauma victims and is filled with thousands of people who have fled their homes and now live in operating rooms, corridors and stairways, he said .

“Literally five or six doctors or nurses” see hundreds of patients a day, Casey said, most with life-threatening injuries, and there were “so many patients on the floor that you could barely move without stepping on someone’s hands or feet.”

The Ministry of Health in Hamas-held Gaza estimates that 60,000 people have been injured, with hundreds injured every day.

Since Israel declared war on Hamas following surprise attacks in the south of the country on October 7, it has repeatedly accused the Islamist militant group of using Gaza’s hospitals as a cover for military activities. It cited Al-Shifa in Gaza City and said Hamas had hidden command centers and bunkers beneath the hospital’s vast grounds. In late November, the Israeli military unveiled what they said was a Hamas military facility beneath the hospital.

Casey said he was able to reach Al-Shifa three times with deliveries of medical supplies, fuel and food, but once it took 12 days due to Israeli refusals, mainly for security or operational reasons.

The situation was also dire at Al-Ahli Hospital, also in Gaza City, he said.

“I saw patients lying on pews, essentially waiting to die in a hospital that had no fuel, no power, no water, very few medical facilities and only a handful of staff left to care for them. ” he said.

Last week, Casey said, he visited the Nasser Medical Complex, the main hospital in Khan Younis, which is at 200% of bed capacity with only 30% of staff, so “patients are everywhere, in the hallways, on the floor .”

“I went to the burn unit where one doctor was caring for 100 burn patients,” he said.

Even in Rafah in the south, near the Egyptian border, where Israel has urged Gazans to move, Casey said the population has risen from 270,000 a few weeks ago to nearly a million, and the city lacks the health facilities to deal with the consequences of the crisis. massive influx of displaced persons.

Gaza historically had a strong health care system with 36 hospitals, 25,000 health workers and many specialists, he said, but 85% of the territory’s 2.3 million people are now displaced, including health workers, doctors, nurses, surgeons and administrative staff.

Casey said many of these medical professionals are in shelters, under plastic sheeting on the streets of Rafah, and not in hospitals. A hospital director told him that his plastic surgeon could not perform surgery because he was collecting sticks to burn as firewood to cook food for his family.

What is needed first and foremost to help the tens of thousands of wounded Gazans and those with health problems is a ceasefire and the safety and security that brings, Casey said, but that is not enough.

“It really is the total package,” he said, saying medical supplies must first overcome obstacles and inspections and enter Gaza, and then they must reach the hospitals where they are needed.

But without healthcare workers, medical supplies and fuel to run generators in hospitals and health facilities, “you can’t do the surgeries, you can’t provide the post-operative care,” he said.

Casey said the World Health Organization is trying to mobilize international emergency medical teams to support Gaza hospitals and provide care. It has also supported the establishment of several field hospitals over the past six weeks, he said.

“The number of medical evacuations outside the Gaza Strip is very limited,” he said. “We know that there are thousands of people who would benefit from higher levels of care that can no longer be provided within the Gaza Strip,” including cancer patients and people with complex injuries.

“People die every day,” Casey said. “I have seen children die on the ground covered in shrapnel because there are no supplies in the emergency department and no healthcare workers to care for them.”

During another press conference, Dr. Seema Jilani, a pediatrician and senior technical advisor for emergency health care at the International Rescue Committee, said she had just been to Gaza for two weeks in partnership with Medical Aid for Palestinians and that what she saw was “harrowing, and scenes from nightmares.”

Jilani, who previously worked in hotspots such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon, said: “In my experience working in conflict zones around the world, this is the most extreme situation I have seen in terms of scale, severity of injuries, number children who suffered who had nothing to do with this.”

Jilani worked in the emergency room of Al-Aksa Hospital in Deir al-Balah, the only hospital in the central area of ​​Gaza. On her first day, she said, she tried to save a boy, about one year old, whose right arm and right leg had been severed, without the necessary medication. Next to him lay a dying man with “flies … already feeding on him,” she said.

Jilani said she treated children with injuries from traumatic amputations to extreme burns, sometimes seeing the smoke from nearby Israeli bombings. “And one day a bullet indeed went through the intensive care unit.”

After she left, Jilani said, the hospital ran out of fuel and the lights went out. She doesn’t know how the babies she treated are doing or whether they have been evacuated.