IRISH-BASED SURGEON SAW ‘WORST INJURIES’ IN GAZA HELL
AN IRISH-BASED surgeon who has returned from a three-week volunteering mission in Gaza has told how “many kids were dying because of burns and massive soft tissue injury and there was only paracetamol to give patients post-surgery”. Dr Mohamed Shaalan has volunteered during conflicts in Gaza in 2012 and Yemen in 2016 but says he saw ‘the worst injuries’ in this life-saving mission.
He had to bring his own implants, instruments and other materials to perform over 80 complex surgeries while working in the Gaza European Hospital.
Dr Shaalan, a senior orthopaedic surgeon in a Dublin major trauma Hospital living in Tallaght, will speak at an international conference in the capital in May, organised by a number of Irish-based doctors to highlight the plight of the collapsed health system in Gaza and future plans to offer help to rebuild it.
Patients
Dr Mahmoud AbuMarzouk, a Navan-based Palestinian doctor who recently lost his brother in Gaza, is secretary of the event for medical professionals titled: Gaza: Health System, Beyond Genocide. Egyptian native Dr Shaalan said he cried leaving his patients because he knew of their plight, and is already planning a return trip next month.
He said: “A team of surgeons covering general, plastic and orthopaedics went to Gaza, through Egypt, to offer medical aid to as many people as we could.
“I knew some healthcare professionals over there who told me that they didn’t even have one single screw left to fix fractures so I took my own supplies, hoping to leave some behind but there was such a demand that we used them all before we were finished over there.
“On our last day...we were met with kids wanting to say hello...They pleaded with us to stay with them - they didn’t want anything - just for us to stay. I’m hoping to go back in May. Yes, I cried when I left because I know some of those children will have passed by the time I get back.”