A little girl cries in pain and screams, “Mama… Mama,” while the nurse stitches a wound on her head without using any anesthetic because it was not available at that time in 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 the 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 for him to bite on to relieve the pain he feels, and we know that the pain he feels is higher than he can imagine, or higher than his age at this young age,” referring to children such as the girl with a wound in her stomach. Head.
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 had not been 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, “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 what happened immediately after the explosion that occurred in the National Arab Baptist Hospital on October 17, and said: “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 finish one by one, we would have lost many of the wounded.”
He added: “We had to work on the ground without any anesthesia, or with a very simple anesthetic, 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.
Abu Salamiya said: “It is certainly painful for the medical teams and it is not a simple matter. But it means that the patient will either suffer or lose his life.”
Israel said that the explosion that occurred in the Arab National 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 supported what Israel said.
At Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip, the hospital director, Doctor Muhammad Zaqout, said: “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 cesarean sections on women without any sedation at all… It was a very painful thing.” Then we had to treat the burns without anesthesia, and without a painkiller because it was not available.”
He explained that the medical teams did their best to relieve the patients’ pain with other, weaker medications, 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.”
During the first 12 days of the most recent conflict, aid was not allowed into Gaza. On October 21, the first convoy of aid trucks arrived from the Rafah crossing on the Gaza Strip’s border with Egypt.
Since then, several convoys have entered, but the United Nations and international relief organizations say that the aid provided is not close to the level required to alleviate the humanitarian disaster.
Zaqout pointed out that “although the shortage of anesthetics in Nasser Hospital has been alleviated thanks to the delivery of aid, there is still a severe shortage in Al-Shifa Hospital and the Indonesian Hospital,” which are located in the north of the sector, which is subject to severe bombing.
2023-11-11 04:29:56
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