The memories are unforgettable. A flood of screaming families carrying their bloodied family members through the doors of an already flooded hospital. A bit boy attempting to resuscitate a baby who looked not much older than him. A 12-year-old boy with shrapnel wounds to the head and abdomen, intubated on the ground.
That January day at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, southern Gaza – following a rocket attack on an aid distribution site – haunted Dr. Zaher Sahloul, an American intensive care specialist with years of experience treating patients in war zones, including Syria and Ukraine.
He and other volunteer doctors who returned from besieged Gaza hospitals brought first-hand accounts of the carnage to Washington this week, hoping to convey to the Biden administration and senior government officials that an instantaneous ceasefire is required to make sure life-saving medical care.
Among the evidence Dr. Sahloul showed to U.S. officials – including members of Congress and officials from the White House, the State Department, the Department of Defense and the U.S. Agency for International Development – was a photograph of a 12-year-old boy and his death certificate. The baby never woke up after surgery after being intubated, the doctor said, and the hospital was unable to contact the family because of an almost complete communication blackout.
Two other doctors in the delegation – Amber Alayyan, deputy program manager for Doctors Without Borders based in Paris, and Nick Maynard, a British surgeon – said that the significant medical progress achieved by local doctors in Gaza had been undermined by Israel’s war with Hamas.
Dr Maynard, who met British Foreign Secretary David Cameron earlier this 12 months, expressed hope that if the United States modified its mind about supporting Israeli forces in Gaza, the UK would follow suit.
“This is a deliberate destruction of the entire health care system,” he said in an interview.
Dr. Maynard described surgery for blast-related chest injuries using small amounts of anesthetic and antibiotics at Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al Balah, central Gaza, in December and January. “The lack of painkillers was particularly concerning because we saw so many children with terrible burns,” he said.
The availability of sterile gloves and surgical drapes was also limited, and the hospital’s record-keeping capabilities were impaired, making follow-up care almost inconceivable, he added. Dr. Maynard said he walked through hallways full of displaced people to examine on the patients he was operating on, but sometimes he didn’t find them.
Also in the delegation was Thaer Ahmad, a Palestinian-American emergency medicine physician who was with Dr. Sahloul in January when Israeli forces surrounded Khan Younis and commenced closing in on Nasser Hospital, the largest still operating in the enclave at the time.
In an interview, he said that when he went to Gaza, he had a small, two-month-old baby at home in Chicago. He compared his wife’s experience of with the ability to give birth in a secure and well-equipped hospital, with visiting an obstetrician she knows well, with the difficult situation of pregnant women in Gaza who were ravenous and giving birth in shelters. “I had to go,” he said. “These are my people.”
Shortly after the doctors left Gaza, Israeli forces raided Nasser’s hospital and compelled it to stop operations.
“I will regret doing that for the rest of my life,” Dr. Ahmad said.
Gaza’s death toll has risen to just about 32,000 in five months, in keeping with the Gaza Ministry of Health, and Palestinian Americans are “screaming at the top of their lungs, but no one is listening,” he added.
“The numbers clearly don’t make a difference,” Dr. Ahmad said. “I’m afraid the death toll could reach 40,000 or 50,000 and we’ll be in the same situation. What else do I actually have to do?”
