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W.H.O.’s Dr. Tedros: Impossible Choices in Gaza’s Largest Hospital - The New York Times [1]
['Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus']
Date: 2023-10-16
Al Shifa Hospital, the largest health care facility in the Gaza Strip, is emblematic of an unfolding humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. Already underresourced and overcrowded, it is now home to thousands of people who have sought refuge from Israeli airstrikes that rained down on their neighborhoods after the horrific and unjustified attacks by Hamas on Israeli civilians on Oct. 7.
Al Shifa Hospital has always been under tremendous strain. When I visited in 2018, I met with patients and health workers and toured a dialysis unit and a neonatal intensive care ward, full of newborns in incubators. Their tentative grasp on life was sustained by diesel generators that powered the hospital when the electricity went off, as it did for several hours every day. Staff members, patients and their families faced difficult choices to make daily.
These choices are now seemingly impossible in the fallout from Oct. 7 — not just at Al Shifa Hospital but at northern Gaza’s other hospitals and clinics as well.
With no electricity and fuel running out in Gaza, within days hospital generators will fall silent, and the incubators, dialysis machines and other lifesaving medical equipment will shut down. Many of the most critically ill patients, including babies, whose lives have only just begun, will probably die. Attempting to move them is equally hazardous. Water scarcity is a grave concern for struggling patients, especially newborns.
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[1] Url:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/16/opinion/gaza-invasion-hospital-tedros-who.html
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