‘It’s a Death Zone’

Taj Ali & Daisy Schofield

It’s a death zone,’ said AthanasiosGargavanis, a trauma surgeon for the World Health Organisation, upon reaching the now defunct emergency department of Nasser medical complex. There were dead bodies in corridors, no tap water at all and no electricity beyond a small backup generator. At least eight patients had died due to lack of oxygen.

This was the grim outcome of Israel’s brutal siege on the barely functioning hospital in the Southern Gaza city of Khan Yunis. Two weeks earlier, 14-year-old Ru’aAtefQadeeh was shot dead by Israeli snipers in front of the Hospital gate while desperately trying to fetch water from a nearby location. A further twenty-one Palestinians in the vicinity of the besieged hospital were killed by Israeli snipers in the days that followed.

During a raid on the hospital, medical personnel were interrogated, and more than seventy healthcare workers were reportedly detained by Israeli forces. ‘I have lived three days of hell, along with my patients’, said one surgeon. ‘What happened to doctors, patients and internally displaced people here is unbelievable, even in your worst nightmares.’

Doctor Ahmed Moghrabi, who was forced to leave Nasser Hospital in the middle of the night with his family, described families being chased by Israeli military dogs as they evacuated. In an interview with Al Jazeera, he detailed how the Israeli military abducted his head nurse, demanding that he take off his clothes. ‘At midnight, it was cold… He was screaming because they used to beat him.’

Gaza Medic Voices, an organisation set up by international medics to provide first-hand accounts from Gaza, shared the following testimony from a nurse at the time: ‘They tied our hands behind our backs, on our knees, our heads on the floors…thirteen hours without food, water, or the bathroom even.’

Far from being an isolated incident, Doctor Rebecca Inglis, an intensive care doctor and co-founder of Gaza Medic Voices, says that the attacks on healthcare workers are systemic. ‘The use of violence and degrading treatment against doctors, nurses and paramedics are recurring themes in the testimonies we have collected.’ Inglis says detainees are being denied family contact, medical care and legal counsel. ‘There is a complete lack of transparency regarding their whereabouts. This is in flagrant violation of international humanitarian law.’

She describes horrific examples of torture and doctors being ‘specifically targeted’ by Israeli forces. ‘They were forced to strip. There were a variety of forms of humiliation. They were getting hit in the face, there were dogs involved, there was electricity involved–absolutely horrendous things were happening,’ she says.

Inglis says she has been in contact with a colleague who was held in detention alongside the head of Al-Shifa Hospital, Doctor Mohammad Abu Silmiyeh, who was abducted while supporting the transfer of ambulances and buses of patients from the hospital to southern Gaza.

 IDF soldiers reportedly undressed the male medical staff and left them in the cold for hours. Many were arrested and taken to an unknown place. Soldiers assaulted medical staff and left them without food or water during the month of Ramadan when they were fasting.

Today, there are no functional hospitals in Gaza. Just twelve remain partially functioning and they and the staff who work in them remain under constant attack.

Before embarking on a medical mission in Rafah last month with Doctors Without Borders (MSF), anaesthesia specialist Doctor Birsen Gaskell was briefed about such dangers. ‘I was told [by MSF] that I might be hit by shelling or be a victim of an explosion,’ she recalls. Birsen was also told multiple times that she could ‘change [her] mind’ and leave the two-week mission even after she’d crossed the border into Rafah. ‘This increased my anxiety levels,’ she says.

Approaching the border, Birsen could hear the explosions and see clouds of smoke just a few kilometres away. When she arrived in Gaza, Birsen says her ‘whole reality changed’. ‘I’d mentally prepared, but when you see it in real life, it’s a lot more intense than you expect.’

‘There is no clean water. There is no sanitation. There is no electricity. There is no schooling–kids are everywhere. There is no vaccination. There is no primary health care,’ says Birsen. ‘The order of life as we know it has just completely collapsed’.

As they endeavour to treat patients in these catastrophic conditions, medics say they feel especially vulnerable to attacks. Birsen had to treat two of her colleagues who’d been attacked in the hospital that they worked in, leaving them severely wounded. ‘They had limb fractures, head injuries–one of them had lost an eye,’ says Birsen. The staff were then arrested–one for forty-five days, the other one for two months–during which time they had received no treatment other than paracetamol tablets. When they reached the hospital, Birsen said that they had ‘severe complications.’ She is unsure if they will survive.

Deliberate Destruction
Under a brutal siege for over sixteen years, operating in Gaza with limited resources has always been a challenge. Israel controls the electricity going into the strip and can therefore cut off the supply when it chooses, leading to frequent power outages in hospitals. It also limits medical supplies reaching Gaza. At the end of 2021, 40 percent of essential drugs and 19 percent of medical disposables were reportedly at ‘zero stock’, meaning less than one month’s supply was available at Gaza’s Central Drug Store. Since October 7, these conditions have worsened ‘a thousand fold.

Medics in Gaza are also contending with severe overcrowding: there are reports that some hospitals in southern Gaza are operating at over 300 percent of their bed capacity. ‘[Patients] were literally put on the floor in the corner of the emergency room and left to die because there was nowhere else for them to go.

The overcrowding in medical facilities is contributing to the soaring rates of infectious disease in Gaza. The World Health Organisation has reported at least 369,000 cases of infectious diseases since the war began–a staggering increase from before October 7.

The scarcity of food poses additional risks for patients recovering from burns and trauma injuries. ‘They need a lot more calories in order to heal because they need to regenerate skin,’ says Birsen. ‘Maybe more than half of [the people we were treating] actually had old injuries, but they were just not healing well, and we were just treating the complications.’

Inglis sees the torture of medical staff as part of a wider, deliberate effort to restrict life-saving care for Palestinians in Gaza. ‘The systematic destruction of the healthcare system in Gaza appears to be a central tenet of the Israeli government’s military strategy,’ she says. In the words of a doctor from Al Shifa when asked why he thought the hospital was being targeted: “Al Shifa Hospital is the heart of Gaza’s healthcare system. You stop the heart, and starve the population, you kill Gaza”.

[Source: The Tribune]

Back to Home Page

Frontier
Vol 56, No. 42, Apr 14 - 20, 2024