Gaza: ‘The health system has collapsed’

THE FIRST UK-FUNDED field hospital has been set up in Gaza by aid organisation UK-MED to deliver emergency and outpatient care. It’s based near Rafah, where 1.5 million Palestinians are taking refuge from the continued conflict between Israel and Hamas. As Grazia went to press, the Palestinian health ministry’s latest estimate is that more than 32,000 Palestinians have been killed since Israel began retaliation for Hamas killing 1,139 and taking 248 hostages in its 7 October terror attack on Israel.

The UK Government has called for an ‘immediate pause in fighting, then progress towards a sustainable ceasefire’. Earlier this month, the United Nations security council resolution called on all sides to commit to a ceasefire, but so far all negotiations are at a stalemate.

For Faye Callaghan, an NHS midwife working at the new field hospital, it is the most immediate and obvious solution to put an end to the destruction she’s seen since arriving in Gaza on 20 March. Callaghan, who has been a midwife for 10 years, is normally based at Gloucester Royal Hospital, but decided to work in Gaza after seeing news coverage of the conflict. It’s only her second deployment with UK-MED, having worked in Libya last year after devastating floods killed more than 4,000 and displaced a further 50,000.

‘We arrived in Gaza as it got dark, via the land border with Egypt, which is a long, slow process because they’re strict on who can come in and what you can bring,’ she explains. ‘The first thing you see is that the country is pretty much destroyed, there’s a lot of people living in tents, milling around in the streets, selling things like tomatoes or beans from tiny stores because that’s all they have to try and make a living. There’s a lot of poverty, but Gaza is also on the coast, so you can see the beach and that it was a beautiful place before the war. There are bits of the tourist infrastructure, like children’s trampolines, that are now completely destroyed, but they’re still trying to play on them because there’s nowhere else to play.’

UK-MED has been working in Gaza since 3 January, sending teams to existing hospitals and setting up mobile health clinics. But according to chief executive David Wightwick, few hospitals remain viable. ‘The health system has largely collapsed, a lot of hospitals are no longer functioning at all,’ he tells Grazia. ‘The number of operating rooms that are viable is down to about 14, for a population of 1.7 million people in the south.’