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Surgeon Ghassan Abu-Sittah on the 'Impending Catastrophe' in Gaza's Hospitals [1]

['Omid Memarian', 'A Journalist', 'Analyst', "Recipient Of Human Rights Watch'S Human Rights Defender Award", 'Is The Director Of Communications At Dawn', 'Root', '--Ppa-Color-Scheme', '--Ppa-Color-Scheme-Active']

Date: 2023-10-26 20:33:03+00:00

How has the lack of humanitarian support, the blockade and Israel's decision to block the shipment of fuel into Gaza, which could be used to keep hospitals running, affected your work?

The fact that there have been 15,000 wounded, that this comes after more than 15 years of siege, and that before the war, Gaza's whole health system had a bed capacity of 2,500, gives you an idea that the system started the war on its knees because of the siege. The sheer number of wounded, the sheer number of attacks, and now the intentional degradation of the capacity of the health system by targeting hospitals like Ahli Baptist Hospital, like Beit Hanoun Hospital, and since yesterday, the fact that fuel has run out in the Indonesian Hospital, which is the biggest hospital in northern Gaza, shows you how the system is unable to cope.

Add to that, everything is run out. We have no burns dressings; external fixators, which are the pins and rods that you need to fix fractures, are finished. You're really very careful in trying to choose what to use in every surgery, to try to conserve all of the consumables, supplies and medication that you have.

In your recent interview with Christiane Amanpour on CNN, you said, "We have now a term in Shifa Hospital called, 'wounded child with no surviving family.'"

A lot of kids are just being taken out of the rubble of their own homes. What's been happening is that people have been sheltering with relatives and you have multiple generations, up to 50 in one apartment, so you're getting multiple generations wiped out in every strike. Yesterday I had a 12-year-old. I had the daughter of a doctor before, whose mother was killed and sister was killed, her father isn't in Gaza. I have two little girls, five years old. I have another girl, eight years old, with burns. It's just full of these children.

What is the status of the medical staff, in terms of the exhaustion of working long hours and under such harsh conditions? How much of the medical staff are local, and how much of it belong to international organizations or aid groups and charities?

People are not just physically exhausted—we've been doing 16 hours [a day] since this war started, if not more. They are emotionally exhausted, the scenes that they see. But also, we've lost so many members of staff. We've had 40 doctors killed, 18 nurses, and a lot of my colleagues have lost family. Almost all of them have had to move their families from their homes. Three of them lost their homes when the buildings that they live in were targeted. People are just completely spent.

There are no foreign staff. There's Médecins Sans Frontières [Doctors Without Borders], I'm with MSF. There's MSF local staff still left.

One of the doctors who was killed is Dr. Medhat Saidam. He's a plastic surgeon and a colleague in this department. I'd worked with him in the 2009 war and in 2014. And he was a lovely, lovely man. He was working that day, and his sister evacuated and came here. He just took her to his house, where he thought she'd be safe—and that's when the house was hit. Before that, I was doing surgery on the remaining child of an obstetrician at Shifa Hospital who was killed with her other daughter. Her husband is in Jordan on work.

What are the immediate needs of the medical staff, and those who are injured?

The immediate need is to transfer the critically ill and wounded patients out of Gaza, to open a humanitarian corridor and bring in the supplies.

The media, like everyone else, should speak out and prevent this impending catastrophe. I think the media needs to state that it is completely unacceptable, not just in the light of all of this carnage, but to then doubly deny the wounded the medical supplies that they need, and that includes fuel for the hospital. This is a double war crime.

How is the situation in the hospitals different now compared to past wars in Gaza, including in 2021? How is the scale of Israel's bombing felt in the hospitals and in the types of injuries you are treating?

You're comparing a flood with a tsunami. The numbers and the speed and the ferocity and the intentional destruction of whole neighborhoods—it has all been completely out of proportion to anything. Maybe the closest thing that happened in the region similar was during the Israeli siege of Beirut in 1982.

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[1] Url: https://dawnmena.org/surgeon-ghassan-abu-sittah-on-the-impending-catastrophe-in-gazas-hospitals/

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