A little girl cries in pain and screams, while the nurse stitches a wound on her head without using any anesthetic because it is not available at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.
This is one of the worst moments that nurse Abu Imad Hassanein narrated as he described the suffering they are going through at a time when they are forced to deal with an unprecedented influx of wounded and a scarcity of pain-relieving medications since the start of the war in the Gaza Strip more than a month ago.
Hassanein said: “We often give him sterile gauze so he can bite it to relieve the pain.”
Upon arriving at Al-Shifa Hospital to change bandages and disinfect a wound on his back sustained in an Israeli airstrike, Nimr Abu Thaer, a middle-aged man, said he was not given any painkillers when the wound was originally stitched.
He added, “I kept reading the Qur’an until they finished it.”
Muhammad Abu Salmiya, director of Al-Shifa Hospital, said that with the arrival of very large numbers of injured people at one time, there is no choice but to treat them on the ground without any drugs to adequately relieve the pain.
He gave an example of this with what happened immediately after the explosion that occurred in the Al-Ahly Arab Hospital on October 17, and said that about 250 wounded arrived at Al-Shifa Hospital, which includes only 12 operating rooms.
Abu Salamiya said: “If we had waited for this large number of wounded to end one by one, we would have lost many of them.”
He added: “We had to work on the ground without any anesthesia, or with very simple anesthetics or very weak painkillers, so that we could save the lives of the wounded.”
Abu Salmiya continued, without going into details, that the operations performed by the medical staff at Al-Shifa Hospital in such circumstances included amputating limbs and fingers, suturing wounds, and treating serious burns.
Israel said that the explosion that occurred in the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital was caused by a missile that did not hit its target, launched by the Islamic Jihad movement, but the movement and Hamas accused Israel of launching an air strike on the hospital.
The United States, an ally of Israel, said that the assessment of its intelligence services supports what Israel said.
At Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip, hospital director Dr. Muhammad Zaqout said that there was a period at the beginning of the conflict when anesthesia supplies ran out completely until aid trucks were allowed to enter.
Zaqout added: “Several operations were performed, including caesarean sections on women without anesthesia at all. It was very painful.”
He explained that the medical teams did their best to relieve the patients’ pain with other medications that had a weaker effect, but this was not enough.
He continued, saying: “This is not the ideal solution for a patient in the operating room. We want to perform the operation on him under full anesthesia.”
2023-11-10 10:09:35
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