At gates of Libya’s war, Tripoli hospital struggles to cope
TRIPOLI: “The pressure was unbearable,” said doctor Mohamad Al-Rajehi, recalling a night early this month when an air strike on a military school completely overwhelmed his public hospital in Libya’s capital. Al-Khadra, one of the biggest hospitals in Tripoli, treated 33 wounded in one night after the attack on January 4, while 30 dead bodies also arrived at the facility. “The hospital doesn’t have the means to treat such a large number” of people, said Rajehi, the hospital’s emergencies manager.
After more than nine months of deadly fighting on the city’s southern outskirts, all of Tripoli’s public hospitals now find themselves unable to cope with the two million or more residents’ needs.
Eastern strongman Khalifa Haftar launched an offensive against the capital, seat of a UN-recognized Government of National Accord (GNA), in April last year. Military stalemate swiftly ensued.
The UN says the fighting has killed more than 280 civilians and some 2,000 combatants, while thousands have been wounded. More than 170,000 Tripoli residents have been displaced. A precarious ceasefire took effect on Jan 12, but heavy weapons fire continues to echo sporadically in the south of the capital.
Exodus of foreign medics Mohamad Ehwas, a doctor who heads medical services at Al-Khadra, said the night of the military school attack was far from an exception. Instead, it is the norm, for a facility flooded daily by the sick and wounded. “The hospital is operating at twice its capacity,” he said. It was established to receive and care for 300 emergency cases at a time, but on “some days, we treat 3,000.” The overcrowding means longer waiting times for treatment. Coming back “every two or three days” to Al-Khadra to lobby for an operation for his father, who needs a coronary angioplasty, Khaled El-Messellati is increasingly disillusioned. “It is nearly impossible to get a quick appointment with a doctor, or even a nurse,” he lamented. And there is no question of him turning to the private sector, despite his father being in desperate need of surgery.