Deir el-Balah, Gaza Strip – Jawdat Sami al-Madhoun could hardly believe it when he saw the doors of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital appear before him. The 26-year-old medical assistant had managed to leave the besieged al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City and walk the 16 kilometers to Deir el-Balah.
Jawdat had spent the previous 25 days as a volunteer at al-Shifa’s emergency department, struggling with the rest of the staff to help the injured as best they could, often without the most basic medications and supplies.
“We couldn’t help the injured,” he told Tel Aviv Tribune on Monday, looking away as his voice cracked. “They were dying! There was nothing we could do to save them. We would just watch them die.
“There are hundreds of corpses in the hospital courtyard. We couldn’t even bury them.
A hospital where no one can help the sick
Al-Shifa has been under siege by Israeli forces since Friday, and no one is allowed to enter or leave the compound of Gaza’s oldest and largest hospital. On Wednesday, Israeli forces attacked it, claiming there was a command center for Hamas fighters inside. This claim has not been proven to date.
The hospital completely lost its electricity supply on Saturday, shutting down all its medical equipment and endangering 39 premature babies whose incubators no longer worked.
Since then, seven babies have died, a toll that grows as the hospital remains offline. Hospital staff buried at least 179 corpses in the courtyard.
Even moving between the compound’s medical buildings, Jawdat said, was a matter of life and death, as Israeli snipers targeted anyone who moved.
“I was a volunteer,” he said. “I received people, sorted certain cases and bandaged everyone I could help. I’m not a fully qualified nurse, but I studied for about a year and a half, so I wanted to do something, anything, to help.
“One day four beautiful little girls arrived, the oldest was around 13 years old, only one of them was injured… they arrived with their deceased family, father, mother, brother, we did the right thing and buried them. “, Jawdat stopped again, lowering his head and sobbing.
“The injured little girl looked at me and said, ‘Please, uncle, let me die with them.’ I don’t know how I would live without my parents and my brother.
“Another day, we received a 12-year-old boy, seriously injured in an attack that killed his family. Every time he saw me, he would say, “Can you either make me better, or let me go (die) with them?”
“I don’t know where we got the energy to do this work. God had to give us all the strength to continue. The doctors worked frantically. They were ready to work three or four days in a row without sleeping, to do anything if they could save one more child or person.
“I have a friend, Islam al-Munshid; I was surprised to find him one day at reception, seriously injured. It turned out that he had been injured during the Israeli attack on the Al-Shifa Gate the day before, and I hadn’t seen him amid all the injuries that were coming. I asked the doctors how he was, and they said, ‘He’s brain dead, but his body is still breathing. Pray that he rests in peace.
“Three days, 72 hours, I was going to check on him every hour to see if he was still breathing or not until he finally died.
“There was nothing we could do. If we had had any equipment we might have been able to help him, but we had nothing so there was nothing we could do. His skull was broken in two places and he would have needed urgent surgery to save his life, but we couldn’t.
A separated family
Jawdat and his wife May, like many families in Gaza, had decided to stay in separate locations in the hope that as many people as possible would survive the relentless Israeli bombardment and be able to reunite later.
May 23 was also in Gaza City, but Jawdat could not reach it due to tanks, snipers and random explosions in the streets.
Speaking of May, Jawdat’s fear got the better of him and he burst into tears again at the thought that he might never see his wife again.
He knew he would never have been able to reach her in Gaza City, but the fact that she had only received one of his messages in several days and that he had not heard from her for three days has upset him.
Desperate to reunite with his family, his mind turned to Deir el-Balah in central Gaza, where he finally managed to convince his mother to move on Friday.
“My mother suffers from kidney disease, but she was adamant that she would never leave her town. She said to me: “If we, the inhabitants of this country, leave it, who will be left to take care of it?
“But her continued presence there posed such a danger to her life and to herself.”
Without his family he felt lost, and in al-Shifa he felt helpless.
“There wasn’t much we could do for the injured. There is no gauze, no oxygen, no supplies. All we could do was clean their wounds. Some of those who died…all they needed was a little oxygen.
The only respite, he says, was when the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was able to help them move the premature babies, all tightly bundled up to keep them as warm as possible without their incubator.
“The ICRC gave us one hour to move premature babies from the maternity ward to the reception room,” Jawdat said.
“They also told us to stay away from windows for fear of being shot. Of course, we are very “grateful” to them for this warning,” he said wryly.
“A bit of courage”
Jawdat left the hospital with a group of displaced people who had taken refuge in al-Shifa, hoping to pass through Israeli soldiers, tanks and snipers to the south.
He knew the risks.
“(Monday) morning we received six cases at the hospital, all injured. They were shot after the Israeli army told them they could leave the building they were in. As they were leaving, they were immediately shot,” Jawdat said.
But he had heard that a previous group, which had left earlier in the day, had managed to escape safely.
“They said they were shot at, but they managed to head south. A little courage, they said. It takes a little courage.”
Jawdat and his companions were shot three times, each time running to try to avoid snipers. Eventually the group split up as the slowest people lagged behind, and others got separated at various intersections.
At one point, Jawdat and some others were stopped by Israeli soldiers, who forced them to raise their hands in the air, holding their ID cards. One man scratched his head, Jawdat said, and was called over by Israeli soldiers. He’s not sure what happened to him after that.
At another point, “they took about 20 men and stripped them, beat them, humiliated them, then released them. It’s as if every time the soldiers get bored, they choose one to intimidate and humiliate them.
It wasn’t the worst that Jawdat had seen on the road. He said he ran past bodies, the severed foot of a little girl and a woman in her 50s, still wearing her prayer clothes, lying dead on the ground.
Jawdat arrived in Deir el-Balah. He does not know how many others have also fled al-Shifa.
