This doctor takes us through a day at the Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City
It was a chaotic scene at the Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City on Tuesday while Dr. Nada Abu al-Rub crossed the corridors who took care of the patients.
One of them, a little boy, had the leg amputate and suffered from burns over his whole body after a shot approached the place where he and his brother were walking. Al-Rub took care of his injuries and, with the last piece of gauze in the department and salt water, cleaned and wrapped his burns.
She said that at that time, the department no longer had a gauze.
She walked in another corridor where steel beds – some without mattresses – bordered the walls, with patients and their families waiting to be seen by one of the remaining medical staff of the hospital.
Another patient, an older gentleman, was at home when the building was bombed. Al-Rub says he fell with internal injuries, including a grated liver and a rectal injury. The bones fractured in his legs were held with rays of steel coming out of his leg.
Al-Rub is Australian, during a tour of volunteers in Gaza with the Palestinian Australian New Zealand Medical Association. She started her passage of a month in the enclave in the center of Gaza, then moved to Gaza City where she says that things are even worse than she could never imagine.
“My brain cannot still realize what is going on, it’s a horror film … A terrorist film,” she said. “I saw things here that I have never seen in my life before.”
Dr. Nada Abu al-Rub, an Australian pediatrician volunteering at the Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City, describes the collapse `Cauchemar ” from the largest Gaza Strip hospital under Israeli blocks and an intensification of air strikes in the region.
Gaza’s medical staff worked 24 hours a day to help victims of the war, repeatedly under siege and heavy bombing in northern hospitals, including Al-Shifa. Doctors and nurses from around the world went to support their colleagues.
But in Al-Shifa, Al-Rub not only meets patients. Many other people have taken refuge in the corridors, lying on covers or bringing together chairs together, hoping that the hospital will be a safe refuge for war. She says that there is no corner of the building that is not filled with a patient or a displaced person.
The injuries she has seen are complex – most of this hospital involve the brain, she says – but for some patients, all that she can offer is an attempt to stabilize them.
“We transfuse blood as much as possible, organize a tourniquet to save the member, take them for a lobotomy to save everything we can save,” she said, although the CT scanner and the MRI of the hospital were both destroyed.
Al-Rub admits that, taking into account the limited resources, she and her colleagues had to make the difficult decision to prioritize certain patients on others.
“As a doctor, you hate letting patients die, but here the situation is different,” she said. Doctors will face the cases they will determine have better chances to survive.
While Al-Rub was heading for the hospital courtyard, the sounds of buzzing drones filled the air. The adjacent buildings of the court are completely blown, burned and surrounded by lots of rubble.
“It’s a horror scene,” she said.
Israel has always said that Hamas uses hospitals as bases for its fighters and as arms deposits to justify the targeting. Hamas denied these complaints.
Earlier this week, two hospitals from Gaza City were put out of service after Israel has widened its field operation in the northern zone of the strip.
In January, Dr. Rik Peeperkorn, a representative of the World Health Organization (WHO) for the West Bank and Gaza, told the United Nations Security Council that the health care system in the band “was systematically dismantled”.
The WHO has checked more than 600 attacks against health establishments in Gaza since October 2023.
While Al-Rub returned to the hospital, she was instantly strewn with questions from various patients in the corridors and stairwells, and finally found herself in the emergency district.
She caught a pair of non -sterile gloves – she says it’s better than not gloves at all – and took care of her next patient.
Despite all that she saw, she says that she hopes that peace will come soon and will end the war.
“Otherwise, I don’t know how we will be forgiven what happened to all these people … it’s too late.”
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