A British-Palestinian surgeon who traveled to the Gaza Strip to help in hospitals warned that without electricity, the hospital he is in “will just be a mass grave”.
Ghassan Abu-Sittah said that without power, “there is nothing to do for the injured” who are at Al-Shifa Hospital, where he works.
“The system is disintegrating and, without a ceasefire and a humanitarian corridor – not 14, 15, 20 symbolic trucks for 2 million people – a true humanitarian corridor, which allows the evacuation of these injured people, allows the entry of aid humanitarian and medical teams arrive. Without that, there will be an even greater catastrophe than what already exists here,” Abu-Sittah told Christiane Amanpour of CNN this Monday (23).
Abu-Sittah said the hospital had run out of burn dressings, with more than a hundred patients admitted with burns covering more than 40 percent of their bodies.
There are more than 150 critically injured patients on ventilators at the hospital, he said, adding that they were also left without “external fixators – the pins and rods needed for orthopedic surgery.”
Abu-Sittah told CNN that several injured people and patients admitted to Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital were taken to Al-Shifa Hospital.
He said electricity is starting to be cut off and there is not enough water pressure to run the sterilization machine needed for surgical instruments.
“The most important thing is that we ran out of space. The hospital, which had a capacity between 550 and 700 beds, now has 1,700 patients on mattresses in the corridors and on the emergency room floors. The situation is dire and we are at the end of the system, which is slowly starting to fall apart,” he said.
The surgeon described treating a 16-year-old boy who “had burns on his face, arms and legs.” He said the boy told him how “he had dinner with his parents, and his father, who was sitting next to him, was killed and his mother suffocated in the fire that caused the burns he had.”
“We now have a term at Shifa hospital called ‘injured child with no surviving family’ to designate more than 50 children who were pulled from the rubble alone, suffered injuries and are being treated at the hospital,” said Abu-Sittah.
“For a system that had a total capacity of 2,500 beds before the start of the war, we are just waiting for the electricity and fuel to run out, and then that will be the death of the health system,” he added.
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Source: CNN Brasil
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