GAZA’S SICK AND INJURED SEARCH FOR HELP

Souad Zohair, 73, has been kept alive by kidney dialysis three days a week at a hospital in Rafah, but that’s shut now by Israel’s latest offensive. Her daughter brought her up the dangerous coastal road to the last hospital left in the Gaza Strip that still has functioning dialysis machines.

In a crowded room, her blood was trickling through tubes from her hand into the machine. Today, she’ll live.

“This is the only remaining hospital [for dialysis] serving the entire Gaza Strip, serving around 1,000 remaining patients with kidney failure,” said Dr Saeed Khattab, head of the kidney department at Al Aqsa Martyrs hospital in Deir Al Balah in central Gaza.

There are 19 machines here. Staff are keeping them running round the clock, 200 sessions a day, with barely enough time to sterilise them between patients, Khattab said. It’s not enough.

Zohair’s treatment is supposed to last four hours, but in Gaza’s brutal medical arithmetic, she can have the machine for just two. No one can say when she will get it again.

“She will soon get tired, tomorrow or the day after, and I don’t know how we will bring her here or where to go,” said her daughter Umm Bilal Zohair. “How will we come here if she gets tired at night? There are no ambulances, the area is dangerous, no ambulances will come to us and there’s nothing.”

Israel’s assault around Rafah on the southern edge of the Gaza Strip is finally bringing what was left of the enclave’s medical system to its knees, doctors say. Tanks are massed on the outskirts of the city and a huge population of sick and injured is running out of places to go and safe ways to get there.