The coordinator of emergency medical teams at the World Health Organization, Sean Casey, who participated in a humanitarian mission to central Gaza, said that there was blood everywhere in the Strip’s hospitals, describing what he saw as “a bloodbath and a massacre,” stressing that there is no safe place in Gaza. .
Casey added – in an interview with the “United Nations News” website – after his visit to Al-Aqsa Hospital in the city of Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip, last Monday, “It is a bloodbath, as we said before, it is a massacre. It is a terrible scene.”
He said that he also saw this in Al-Shifa Hospital in the north, and he also saw it in the past weeks in the two largest hospitals in the southern part of Gaza, namely the Gaza European Hospital and the Nasser Medical Complex, in the past weeks, stressing that the situation is very similar in the emergency department of any hospital in any part of the country. Gaza strip.
He added that “there is no safe place in Gaza,” noting that there was a camp containing thousands of displaced people 50 meters from the United Nations Joint Humanitarian Operations Center in Rafah. However, the sound of clashes was audible almost throughout the night, with reports coming in during the day of many casualties. Which reached hospitals in the south.
He said that across Gaza right now, health capacity is about 20% of what it was 80 days or so ago. Almost all services stopped working, either because the facilities themselves were damaged, or because staff had to flee, or because power supplies ran out, or because medical supplies ran out, or because staff could not reach them.
He said that only two hospitals remain in southern Gaza that are fully operational, namely the Gaza European Hospital and the Nasser Medical Complex, noting that many employees cannot reach the Gaza European Hospital due to the fighting in the surrounding area, and employees are also leaving the Nasser Medical Complex because the area is unsafe. Especially when an evacuation order was received for the complex.
He also stressed that many hospitals throughout Gaza suffer from a shortage of supplies and overcrowding with patients and injured, and said that emergency departments witness many cases of trauma, while all those suffering from non-communicable diseases – such as cancer patients, diabetes, heart patients and other conditions – are unable to There is no access to services in most parts of the Gaza Strip at the present time.
He said that Al-Aqsa Hospital suffers from a shortage in the number of surgeons and the lack of sufficient space to accommodate the number of incoming patients, and there is a process of sorting and accelerating the provision of care for those suffering from serious injuries, due to the shortage of workers.
Casey also pointed to the logistical difficulties facing the limited number of supply trucks coming through the Rafah crossing, as they must coordinate with the parties to the conflict to ensure that the roads are as safe as possible for crossing.
He explained that sometimes these roads change and they have to pass through crowded areas, and with the displacement of approximately two million people, huge crowds live in certain areas, and in Rafah it may sometimes take half an hour to cover one kilometer due to the large number of people in the streets.
In addition, he said, the level of destruction increases unbelievably the further north you go. The roads are full of rubble, there are downed wires, power lines and downed poles. They have to cross checkpoints, follow security procedures and deal with road conditions, punctured tires from walking over rubble and exposed rebar. After the destruction of homes as a result of Israeli bombing.
He also reiterated that patients in Al-Ahly and Al-Shifa hospitals are still waiting to die, and said that many patients who should be in intensive care units are sleeping in lines, noting that the options are more and more limited with the difficulty of accessing medical facilities and the displacement of health workers themselves.
