12/23/2023–|Last updated: 12/23/202310:15 AM (Mecca time)
Palestinian surgeon Bashir Al-Hourani, who helps manage a field hospital set up inside a school in central Gaza, has only gauze and iodine disinfectant to treat those who were transferred from hospitals crowded with wounded as a result of the ongoing Israeli bombing of the Strip.
“We only have gauze and antiseptic. More than that (sic) we don’t have anything,” he said while holding a bottle of iodine that he used to cleanse the scar of a long wound extending from the chest to the abdomen of one of the injured men.
He added, “Of course, the patient is supposed to stay inside the hospital, but due to the overcrowding, he was transferred to the field hospital.”
Al-Hourani said, “We have dozens of people like this patient. We have children. Children are difficult to deal with. We are surprised when we change him the next day to find a severe infection because there is no sterilization, no prepared places, no designated places, and no waste bins.”
The Sayyida Khadija School, which was turned into a field hospital, is located in Deir al-Balah in the middle of the small, crowded Palestinian enclave that has been besieged and bombed by Israeli forces, and in which it has been carrying out ground operations for weeks as part of its ongoing war on Gaza since the seventh of last October.
Hospitals are exhausted
The war led to the death of more than 20,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to local health authorities in the Strip, and the injury of 50,000 others.
Meanwhile, hospitals stopped working and almost all medical supplies were exhausted, including hospitals in the southern Gaza Strip and the city of Rafah.
The Ministry of Health in Gaza said on Friday that the city of Rafah, south of the Gaza Strip, has become a health disaster due to the Israeli “aggression”, stressing that medical teams are unable to provide their services.
Ministry spokesman Ashraf Al-Qudra said, “Hospitals in Rafah are small, medical teams are unable to provide life-saving services, and the city of Rafah has become a disaster area in terms of health.”
Al-Qudra added, in a statement, that “Abu Youssef Al-Najjar Hospital in Rafah has lost control over providing health care to hundreds of wounded due to the (Israeli) occupation massacres.”
Insufficient international aid
Aid agencies say that although some aid has entered Gaza from Egypt in recent weeks, much of it has been difficult to distribute outside the immediate border area, and hospitals elsewhere in the Strip are barely able to function.
On Friday, the Security Council issued a resolution urging urgent steps to immediately allow humanitarian aid to reach “safely, unhindered and on a large scale.” However, UN Secretary-General António Guterres criticized the way Israel is carrying out its war, which “creates enormous obstacles to the distribution of humanitarian aid” in Gaza.
The United Nations says that available aid represents only 10% of what is needed.
Doctors Without Borders said in a post on social media on Friday that doctors at Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis in southern Gaza are “stepping on the bodies of dead children to treat other children who will die anyway.”
“There’s nowhere else to go”
In the field hospital in Deir al-Balah, Al-Hourani was busy bandaging the head of Maysara Abu Taylakh, a boy who was injured in the bombing but was discharged early from the nearby Al-Aqsa Hospital to make room for dealing with more serious cases.
His father, Jihad Abu Talekh, said, “They had to take Maysara to the field hospital they are currently in, which is a school, on the basis of completing treatment…despite the fact that the situation here is difficult in terms of medical equipment and a shortage of medicines, nurses, and doctors.”
The family lost their home and is now temporarily residing in the field hospital while looking for another place to seek refuge.
The father added, “Now we cannot find a place. I mean, after the bombing of the place where we were displaced, there is no place for us. We will have to leave here temporarily until we find another place or shelter to sit in.”