Doctors, back from Gaza hospitals, tell Washington about the horrors during the ceasefire
The memories are unforgettable. A flood of screaming families carrying their bloodied loved ones through the doors of an already flooded hospital. A little boy trying to resuscitate a child who didn’t look much older than himself. A 12-year-old with shrapnel wounds to his head and abdomen is intubated on the floor.
That January day at the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis in southern Gaza – the aftermath of a rocket attack on an aid distribution site – Dr. Zaher Sahloul, an American intensive care specialist with years of experience treating patients in war zones, including Syria and Ukraine.
He and other volunteer doctors who have returned from besieged hospitals in Gaza took their firsthand account of the massacre to Washington this week, hoping to make clear to the Biden administration and senior administration officials that an immediate ceasefire was necessary to provide life-saving medical care.
Among the evidence that Dr. Sahloul showed to U.S. officials — including members of Congress and officials from the White House, the State Department, the Department of Defense and the U.S. Agency for International Development — was a photo of the 12-year-old boy and his death certificate. The child never woke up from the surgery after the intubation, the doctor said, and the hospital was unable to reach his family due to a near-total communications breakdown.
Two other doctors in the delegation – Amber Alayyan, a Paris-based deputy program manager for Doctors Without Borders, and Nick Maynard, a British surgeon – said the robust medical progress achieved by local doctors in Gaza had been undone by Israeli war against Hamas. .
Dr. Maynard, who met with British Foreign Secretary David Cameron earlier this year, said he was hopeful Britain would follow if the US changed its position on supporting what Israeli forces were doing in Gaza.
“This is the deliberate destruction of the entire health care system,” he said in an interview.
Dr. Maynard described operating on chest injuries from explosions with little anesthetic or antibiotic use at Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al Balah in central Gaza in December and January. “The lack of pain relief was particularly troubling as we saw many children with horrific burns,” he said.
The availability of sterile gloves and surgical drapes was also limited, and the hospital’s record-keeping capabilities had collapsed, making follow-up care virtually impossible, he said. Dr. Maynard said he walked through hallways crowded with displaced people to check on the patients he operated on, but sometimes he couldn’t find them.
Also in the delegation was Thaer Ahmad, a Palestinian-American emergency physician who joined Dr. Sahloul was when Israeli forces surrounded Khan Younis and began closing in on Nasser Hospital, the largest hospital still functioning in the enclave at the time.
He said in an interview that he had a toddler and a two-month-old baby at home in Chicago when he traveled to Gaza. He contrasted his wife’s experience of giving birth in a safe, well-equipped hospital with a midwife she knows well, and the plight of pregnant women in Gaza who went hungry and gave birth in shelters. “I had to go,” he said. “They are my people.”
Not long after the doctors’ departure from Gaza, the Nasser Hospital was raided by Israeli forces and forced to cease operations.
“I will regret leaving when I did for the rest of my life,” said Dr. Ahmad.
As the death toll in Gaza has risen to nearly 32,000 in five months, Palestinian Americans have been “screaming at the top of our lungs, and no one is listening,” according to the Gaza Health Ministry, he added.
“The numbers clearly don’t make a difference,” said Dr. Ahmad. “I’m afraid the toll could reach 40,000 or 50,000 and we’ll end up in the same situation. What else should I do?”