As hospitals in Gaza collapse, medical workers face the toughest choices
In some hospitals, patients who suffer cardiac arrest are not resuscitated, because medical staff choose to work on patients with a greater chance of survival. Few seriously injured people receive a hospital bed. Even less, a ventilator or anesthesia for operations, including brain operations, the doctors said. There has been a shortage of anesthesia for about two weeks, doctors say.
In addition to all these challenges, hospitals have also become temporary orphanages, according to medical workers.
In some cases, children have arrived at hospitals after their entire family had died in the war or watched their parents die on hospital stretchers or tile floors. Medical staff have been caring for some of the children until a family member can pick them up.
Dr. Najjar said every day at his hospital begins with a struggle to maintain dwindling fuel supplies. That struggle is shared by the 19 other hospitals that still function, to varying degrees, in Gaza.
And the pressure on these hospitals is increasing as they compensate for 16 hospitals that are now out of service, according to a statement from the Ministry of Health on Thursday.
On Friday, an explosion near the entrance to Gaza City’s Al Shifa Hospital struck a convoy of ambulances carrying injured people preparing to evacuate to Egypt, said a Hamas spokesman and the head of the hospital, Dr. Mohammad Abu Salmiya. Thirteen people were killed and many others were injured, said Dr. Abu Salmiya, adding that paramedics and patients who were evacuated were among the injured, while the hospital suffered damage from the explosion.
According to the newspaper, two other hospitals were attacked on Friday World Health Organisation.
The Israeli army said it had carried out an airstrike on an ambulance “used by a Hamas terror cell.” An Israeli military spokesman, Major Nir Dinar, confirmed it was the same attack that caused the explosion outside the hospital.
Doctors at two hospitals in Gaza said that because there is nothing to power air conditioners, the heat has become so bad that it is causing patients’ wounds to fester. Medical personnel need dwindling fuel supplies to illuminate operating rooms.
At the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, operations are carried out using a mobile phone flashlight, a doctor there said. Vinegar is sometimes used to disinfect wounds without containing iodine.
The Gaza Strip has been plunged into darkness and cut off from the world after the area’s only power plant ran out of fuel and the Israeli army cut off telecommunications. Ambulance drivers say they often have to chase the sounds of air raids to know where they are needed.