Health in Ghiza strip

 “The wounded keep dying in front of your eyes but there’s nothing you can do, and I think that is a trauma I will carry with me for all my life,” Bassel Amr, a volunteer ICU physician told Middle East Eye. He called the aftermath of ground attacks ‘beyond worst case scenario’ as the situation on the ground in Gaza unfolds.

 

Gaza’s hospitals were already at full capacity, tending to patients, including those who were wounded, pregnant women, children, and newborn infants in the aftermath of Israeli airstrikes. Unfortunately, with the recent ground invasion, the situation has further deteriorated. In addition to the existing patients, healthcare personnel are now also confronted with trauma injuries resulting from ground attacks.

“The smell of blood and sand is everywhere,” Dr Mohammad Mattar, head of the radiology department at Al-Shifa Hospital which is Gaza Strip’s largest and as of now only operational medical complex since other places have run out of fuel told NPR.

“We are left in a situation where we have to make the difficult decision to risk the life of one patient to save the life of another,” Dr Amr said. He emphasized that the hospital is extremely overcrowded, with “no space to walk,” as thousands of civilians have sought shelter there due to the Israeli airstrikes. Similar to the situation at Al-Shifa, Al-Awda is grappling with insufficient capacity to handle casualties and is facing a critical shortage of medical supplies, especially after the ground invasion.

He added that Gaza is now suffering from a shortage of shrouds.“There is nothing worse than not finding enough shrouds to cover the martyrs, so you wrap them with garbage bags and old pieces of cloth,” he said.

“Now, with the ongoing siege and the fuel running out, a humanitarian catastrophe is imminent, and we will lose patients in our department and possibly thousands of patients in the entire hospital,” he added.

Previously, in a video released by DW Cut, doctors have pleaded several times that Gaza is about to experience a total collapse of the healthcare system due to supplies running out like sand in hand and the number of casualties increasing each day.