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How doctors in Gaza persevere amid Israel attacks
Against every instinct
How doctors in Gaza persevere amid Israel attacks
By Hanna Duggal, Mohamed Hussein and Soha Elghany
Published On 23 Jan 202423 Jan 2024
“No doctor wakes up in the morning and says: ‘I’m going to amputate a child’s leg without anaesthesia.’
“You don’t want to watch children suffer,” Dr Amber Alayyan with Doctors Without Borders, known by its French initials MSF, tells Al Jazeera.
The measured cadences of the voice of the charity’s deputy programme manager for Palestine suggests just how inconceivable it is for her, as a doctor and a mother, to cause pain to a patient and to a child.
Yet it is the moral conflict her colleagues in Gaza face daily, minute by minute, as they try to treat unprecedented numbers of injured people flooding into the Gaza Strip’s barely functioning hospitals.
Your natural instinct is to take care of people… to protect people. … You’ve been trained over and over and over and over for years.
BY DR AMBER ALAYYAN
As doctors in Gaza are forced to make split-second decisions on who to save and who to let die, on whose pain to relieve and whose they do not have time to, it is that innate instinct and their Hippocratic oath that is assailed by decisions they never thought they’d have to make.
Burdened with personal losses and struggling to operate under unrelenting Israeli bombardments, this is the story of how medical workers are fighting to keep Gaza’s healthcare system going.
How Gaza’s healthcare system has been destroyed
It is nearing midnight in Gaza and Mohamed S Ziara, a Palestinian doctor, is on a WhatsApp call to Al Jazeera. His tone is soft and unaffected by the rumbling explosions and pop of gunfire that can be heard in the background.
The plastic surgeon is working 12- to 14-hour shifts, six days a week at the European Gaza Hospital (EGH) in Khan Younis, where he treats up to 15 cases a day.
Ziara describes the healthcare situation as “catastrophic”.
“It doesn’t match anything I’ve seen before, even with previous escalations and war,” says Ziara, who has worked during Israel’s assaults on Gaza since 2014.
He has been posting about Israeli attacks near the EGH and the conditions inside on his Instagram account.
News source:www-aljazeera-com.cdn.ampproject.org/…/how-doctors-in-gaza-persevere-amid-israel-attacksttps
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