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Gazans face hospital crisis

Jerusalem: Even before Saturday when dead bodies piled up outside morgues and people with missing limbs were forced to wait for surgery, Gaza’s hospitals were in crisis.

With power blackouts lasting up to 12 hours a day, 20 per cent of drugs out of stock, medical equipment standing idle for want of spare parts and stores emptied of basic items, doctors had been turning patients away for months.

“The hospitals in Gaza are in a disastrous situation, starved of essential drugs for months and now overwhelmed with casualties from this onslaught. Only the most serious cases are getting any attention,” said Chris Gunness, the U.N.’s Relief and Works Agency spokesman. “There’s a strong likelihood that people are dying needlessly.” Ever since Israel sealed off Gaza in June 2007, allowing only minimum deliveries, there have been shortages of food, fuel and medical supplies.

But in the past two months the shortages have become so severe that at Shifa hospital, cleaners were mopping the floor with plain water because there was no disinfectant and the laundry, which was out of hospital grade detergent, was unable to clean blood from blankets. By Sunday, doctors were performing surgery in “curtains” as there were no more theatre garments, Dr. Khamis El Essi told the BBC.

The hospital has seen a threefold rise in burns patients as households have been forced to cook on old, pressurised fuel stoves and open fires. Three-quarters are children.

“Children huddle around fires outside their houses because it’s winter and there’s no electricity for heating in their house and they play around their mothers who are cooking in small rooms with the stoves,” said Ran Yaron, who works with the Israeli Physicians for Human Rights.

— © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2008

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