Gaza- Leaning on his grandfather, child Faris Al-Jasser (13 years old) stands on one foot, raising his other foot, which is pierced by platinum skewers, on the side of the road under the afternoon sun, waiting for a vehicle to pass and take them to the Indonesian hospital, to change the bandages for the boy’s wounds and see the specialist doctor.
Fares is the only survivor of a massacre that killed his parents and siblings two months ago in Jabalia, north of the Gaza Strip, and he remained alone, suffering first from the fire of their separation, and second from the burns in which the fire consumed the flesh of his right leg.
Tel Aviv Tribune Net met Fares in the house he moved to with his grandparents after their home was destroyed, where his eyes reveal his pain, and he says, “I am in a lot of pain. Platinum is heavy and I cannot live with it or accept it while I get up, sleep, and change my clothes.”
The boy does not leave his displacement room except to go to the hospital, and describes his exit there as a “very tough journey,” where he stops for a long time to find a means of transportation to take him, or borrows a wheel chair from a neighbor in which he travels a bumpy road for more than half an hour until arriving at the hospital.
Surgery without anesthesia
In the National Arab Hospital “Al-Baptistian”, Al-Jazeera Net toured the corridors of the orthopedic surgery department, to monitor the suffering of the wounded in Platinum. The sound of one of them screaming led us to his story; He is injured. Nurses are checking his health condition after the tenth surgery performed on his legs.
“Without anesthesia,” medical personnel change the bandages on Muhammad Ashour’s wounds, and remove the pus resulting from complications from repeated operations. Anesthetic medications are no longer available, nor are painkillers, of which only a few remain, due to the aggression and siege that has continued for nearly a year.
“He can no longer bear any pain, and when the nurses touch him he screams like a child,” says Suzan, wife of Muhammad, who has not left his hospital bed for 7 months.
The wife flips through photos on her phone to show us the cuts caused by Muhammad lying on his back for a long time. She says, “His condition is deteriorating. His body no longer responds to antibiotics, or accepts the presence of platinum nails in him.”
Muhammad was trapped in Al-Shifa Medical Complex for more than two weeks, which caused him a health setback, rot, and severe infections in his legs, and to this day he still suffers from its ravages to no avail. The doctors told her that the platinum device in her leg would take at least a year. She cried and said, “I burned between the fire of not being able to leave my husband alone inside the hospital, and the fire of being away from my four children and having been dispersed for months with relatives.”
Starvation and “broken bones”
Muhammad appears like a skeleton. His inability to eat in moderation prevents him, and the high prices prevent him from purchasing suitable food for him. Susan says, “I do not have the ability to buy a chicken for $80. Muhammad feeds on cucumbers, watercress, and pickles.”
It is the same reason that caused Rani Doghmush to lose half his mass after his weight exceeded 100 kilograms before the famine. He told Tel Aviv Tribune Net while exposing his back, “My rib cage has become visible.” He talked about the relapses and cases of fainting that he frequently experiences as malnutrition worsens. He adds, “Fractures require twice as long to heal because we have been eating nothing but canned food for months.”
For 11 months, Rani, 20 years old, has been bedridden. He has not straightened his back or bent his knee, and he only moves on a stretcher for the wounded to the operating rooms in hospitals in the northern Gaza Strip.
While the platinum skewers implanted in his thigh bone extended until below the knee and outside his body, the young man Eid was targeted inside a mosque in the Tal al-Hawa neighborhood in western Gaza, as a result of which his leg bone disintegrated, and his condition prompted the doctors to install platinum to connect the bone, and he needs another period of repair. Treatment to enable him to stand on his legs. He says, “My feet do not touch the ground. There is a bone deficiency of 5 centimeters in length.”
As for Rani, he was silent for a while, then concluded the interview, “Let me walk for just one day like a normal person, then let me sit. I am very tired.”
Like ironing
Like burning blocks of fire extending from inside their bodies to outside, the wounded describe the platinum columns fixed to their limbs. It is “like cauterization with fire, it is indescribable, my daughter,” as Mrs. Umm Ali Al-Nimr answered us when we asked her about the nature of the pain caused by platinum.
Umm Ali says a word and is silent for a moment, taking air from the oxygen tubes installed in her nose, then she remembers the incident of her injury: “A missile landed on my feet when I was standing to prepare breakfast for my family. My husband, daughter, and uncle were martyred, and I was left without any healthy part of my body.”
For days, she has been like an idol pinned to the bed. She cannot move any of her limbs, relies only on solutions for her food, and cannot go to relieve herself like all the infected people we met.
Are you tired? He answered her tears, but she did not say a word, then she muttered, “May God give me patience through the pain.”
They volunteer platinum
Tel Aviv Tribune Net met with an orthopedic consultant and acting director of Baptist Hospital, Dr. Fadl Naeem, who said, “Doctors resort to using an external platinum device to temporarily stabilize bone fractures until the fracture area stabilizes.”
Naeem attributed the difficulty of healing fractures and taking a long time to recover to “famine, malnutrition, and the lack of nutrients with bone-building values.” He said that these devices generally lead to infections around the nails that enter from the skin to the bone, and also lead to stiffness in the joints and weakness in the muscles, in addition to daily suffering with personal hygiene, clothing, and sleep.
Naeem spoke of a great scarcity of anesthetics and painkillers, and that a number of patients developed addictions to some painkillers, forcing them to ration their dispensing and monitor them.
Naeem pointed out that thousands of patients are in urgent need of referral to treatment abroad, due to the lack of resources, the accumulation of cases, and the long waiting period on operating lists, in addition to the lack of sufficient specialists in the northern region of the Gaza Strip.
He explained that the continued closure of the crossings and the delay in transferring them may lead, in some cases, to the amputation of limbs or the abnormal healing of fractures.
The acting director of the hospital confirmed that the health system in the world allocates for each area of human bones a type and form of appropriate platinum, but doctors in Gaza are forced to use simple platinum and modify it to suit the affected bone. They were also recently forced to reuse devices and screws and transfer them from a patient. To another after sterilization.