Blast wounds and burns: Rafah’s healthcare crisis
Rafah’s threadbare health network is collapsing when people there need it most.
The city’s largest hospital was shuttered two days ago, in a panic, after Israel ordered 100,000 Palestinians in southeastern Gaza to evacuate. Small clinics that accommodated hundreds of people a week closed as well, with staff members forced to flee the violence.
Bodies lay where they fell, in the “red zone” the few ambulances available could not reach because of Israeli bombardment, a Palestinian Red Crescent spokeswoman said earlier this week. Border crossings remained closed on Thursday (local time), stranding critically ill patients waiting to be evacuated to Egypt and preventing international doctors and badly needed medical supplies from getting in.
Israel’s military operations in Rafah this week have overwhelmed healthcare workers, who were already struggling to treat displaced Palestinians suffering from malnourishment, explosive injuries and an array of diseases, which doctors say are spreading rapidly through the city’s filthy and overcrowded tent camps.
Children were most at risk, as they have been throughout seven months of war. Thousands of infants in southern Gaza are acutely malnourished, and nearly all children under 5 in the area are suffering from “one or more infectious diseases”, according to Unicef.
Israel has called its operations “limited”. Doctors said it was nothing of the sort, as munitions fell on an area smaller than the Istanbul Airport complex, packed with more than a million people.
“There are no words to express the catastrophe of what we are experiencing,” said Suhaib al-hams, the director of the Kuwait Specialised Hospital in Rafah, which remained open but critically unprepared for the flood of patients with brain and head injuries, limbs that needed amputating, and burns so severe they could not be treated “with our simple capabilities”.
There were not enough doctors, he said, and not enough beds.
Israeli’s evacuation order on Monday, and its seizure of the Rafah crossing along Gaza’s border with Egypt – a vital artery for aid, fuel and humanitarian workers – appeared to be the start of its long-threatened invasion of the city, which it says is home to Hamas’ last intact battalions.
United States President Joe Biden said this week that he would halt the shipment of offensive weapons to Israel if ground forces moved into Rafah.
As residents began to flee on Monday, Hamas officials announced they had accepted an Arab ceasefire proposal, and the news briefly sparked celebrations in the streets. But Israel said the terms proposed were unacceptable, and the airstrikes have continued.
The cheering could still be heard that evening as ambulances started arriving at the European Hospital in Rafah, said Mohammed Abdelfattah, a Palestinian American doctor volunteering there. He walked to the emergency room and saw an infant girl, “with pink toenails and little feet, with the breathing tube”. She had suffered “severe trauma” from a strike.
“Her mom was sitting behind her, just screaming that she wished it was her. Someone was doing CPR on the baby, and she didn’t make it.”
That night, doctors started clearing the Abu Youssef al-najjar Hospital, Rafah’s largest, said Marwan al-hams, the hospital director. “The medical teams were unable to hold on, due to the danger.”
Some patients were sent home and others to different medical facilities.
“Today, we had to close two of our medical clinics ahead of schedule despite the overwhelming needs,” said Moses Kondowe, of Project Hope’s team in Rafah.
If the violence continued and health services remained suspended, he warned, “we can expect to see malnutrition, pregnancy complications, and other health conditions like hepatitis A and cholera increase”.