Wounded Palestinians flock to Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip, and exhausted medics try to help those injured in the ground attack and Israeli bombing.
Doctor Khaled Abu Awaimer said that the hospital is running out of medical supplies and that many of the remaining paramedics have already been displaced, and they fear being attacked again and having to flee again.
Abu Awaimer said in a video clip obtained by Reuters that they face cases that they cannot help; Because they have nothing to offer and feel completely helpless.
Since October 7, 2023, the Israeli army has been waging a devastating war on Gaza, which as of Thursday has left more than 23,000 martyrs, more than 59,000 injured, most of them children and women, massive infrastructure destruction, and an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe, according to the Gaza Strip authorities and the United Nations.
The United Nations warned of the collapse of the health system due to the difficulties facing the Strip’s hospitals, the bombing conditions under which medical teams work, with power outages, water supplies and insufficient medical stocks.
As Abu Awaimer spoke, dozens of people were moving in a crowded area of the hospital, some pulling stretchers, while medics prepared bandages.
Abu Awaimer said that the hospital’s surroundings were recently bombed, and ambulances were destroyed.
The Palestinian Red Crescent Society said – last Wednesday – that the Israeli army targeted one of its ambulances in Deir al-Balah, killing 4 medical workers and wounding two inside the vehicle that was transporting them to receive treatment.
On one of the beds, a patient lay with a respirator mask on his face and blood pooling on the floor below. Elsewhere, an injured man sat on the floor as water mixed with blood poured from an adjacent room.
Many members of the medical teams working in Al-Aqsa Hospital have already fled from other hospitals in northern Gaza in the face of the Israeli ground attack. Abu Awaimer said that they now fear a repeat of what happened and that they will be forced to flee again.
Mass casualties
British doctor James Smith was part of a volunteer mission organized by the United Kingdom-based Palestinian Medical Aid Society. The mission had been working in Al-Aqsa Hospital since late last December, until he was forced to leave last weekend.
Smith said patients at the hospital were suffering from the most serious conflict injuries he or his fellow foreign doctors had ever seen.
He added, “Every day we may witness an incident of large numbers of casualties falling after another large number of casualties,” and he said that Al-Aqsa is the only hospital operating in the region.
He added that hundreds of people arrive every day, most of them physically injured, but many of them are also in a state of extreme distress, and some of them cannot control their crying, and their breathing is disturbed from the intensity of the emotion.
He added that doctors and nursing teams are working in shifts around the clock, treating patients on the ground due to a shortage of beds. Paramedics may work to save a patient while another is dying in the same room.
He described the case of an 11 or 12-year-old girl who came one day after an explosion, and her entire face and most of the upper half of her body had been burned to a degree that completely disfigured her features, and her arms had been reduced until her hands were pointing toward the ceiling.
He added that the girl was not destined to live.
In addition to the risk of injuries resulting from the bombing, the lack of food, clean water, and electricity, and the mass exodus of Gaza residents to tents, also affects health.
Jamila Abu Amsha, a woman who lives with her children in a tent in Rafah after fleeing the bombing surrounding her home in northern Gaza, said she has not been able to wash her children’s clothes or bodies for 10 days.
She added that the entire population of the Gaza Strip is dying and the world is watching.