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Gaza- On the ground, with modest blankets that do not protect them from the bitter cold, Doctor Muhammad Madi and his family have been living, for about two weeks, in a shelter inside the Al-Quds Public School in the city of Rafah south Gaza strip.
Doctor Muhammad Madi and his family took refuge in this school, along with fellow doctors and nurses and their families, 12 days ago, after spending difficult days inside Al-Rantisi Hospital in Gaza City, where the occupation imposed its siege of the hospital with tanks and military vehicles.
The siege of the hospital coincided with an air and artillery bombardment that formed fire belts around its walls, causing new wounds to 8 wounded people inside its rooms and departments.
3 days of siege, air strikes, artillery shelling, and Israeli threats to medical staff, patients and wounded, ended with the hospital being evacuated by intervention. International Committee of the Red Cross.
Displaced doctors and nurses told Al Jazeera Net, “We were forced to evacuate the hospital, after we refused for days to evacuate it without the sick and wounded, and about 2,000 displaced civilians taking shelter in it.”
Hard days
“It is the most difficult in my life,” is how Muhammad Madi describes the three days of siege inside Rantisi Hospital, which he has not left since the first day of the Israeli war on the Gaza Strip on the seventh of last October.
He told Al Jazeera Net, “I entered the hospital on the first day of the war, and my family joined me, and we were forced out after the tanks entered and imposed a stifling siege around it, coinciding with shells falling around us, spreading death and fear.”
Madi joined his family, consisting of his wife and six children, after Israeli air strikes destroyed two apartments he owned in a residential building north of Gaza City. He explained, “I preferred for us to stay together after I sensed the danger early on, that this war is different from all previous wars of the occupation against Gaza.”
Before the siege of the hospital, its administration, like other hospitals in Gaza City and the northern Gaza Strip, received Israeli warnings via telephone calls and dropping leaflets from airplanes, of the necessity of evacuating it.
With the Israeli incursion overland from the northern Gaza Strip towards Gaza City, the hospital, adjacent to other hospitals in the Al-Nasr neighborhood, was the target of the occupation through siege and direct targeting.
Madi added that moving from one department to another and from one building to another within the hospital walls was a difficult task and fraught with many risks, in light of the shooting from Israeli drones flying over the hospital at all times, targeting everyone who moved on the ground.
Challenges and obstacles
Although Al-Rantisi Hospital specializes in tumors and childhood cancers, the repercussions of the Israeli war and the huge number of wounded made it open its doors to relieve pressure on the rest of the public hospitals, especially Al-Shifa Hospital The main one, according to Madi, is the director of nursing at the hospital, and headed a surgery department that was opened to deal with war emergencies.
According to Madi, the hospital was forced to stop work in 11 specialized departments, and maintain 3 departments, which are intensive care, pediatric dialysis, and oncology, to keep pace with the repercussions of the war on Gaza, and to deal with the emergency resulting from the non-stop cascade of blood, as a result of the Israeli raids by air, land, and sea. .
Because the hospital is not qualified to deal with war situations, it faced severe challenges and obstacles, resulting from the lack of human cadres of doctors and nurses, and the lack of medical capabilities and supplies necessary to provide care for the wounded, says Muhammad Madi.
This reality prompted nurses Mahmoud Bardaa and his wife to volunteer at Al-Rantisi Hospital, where they moved there with their six children. They left with the rest of them and moved south towards the city of Rafah, where they live with Madi, his family, and other hospital staff at Al-Quds Public School.
Bardaa told Al Jazeera Net that they spent days of terror in Rantissi Hospital, and death was close to them, not only as a result of missiles and missiles, but also from hunger and thirst.
He added that they had to mix salt water with medical water used in dialysis operations to reduce its salinity and use it for drinking, while a few dates daily were their basic meal.
Volunteer and help
After they were forced to evacuate the hospital, Bardaa chose to accompany his friend Madi on their exodus to the city of Rafah. Despite this bitter experience, they and other colleagues decided to continue performing their humanitarian medical mission inside shelter centers in government schools in this city, where more than 300,000 displaced people have taken refuge, according to estimates. Official.
Doctors and nurses at Al-Quds Public School converted a small room that was used as a kitchen into a clinic, to provide primary medical care services to thousands of people displaced from their homes in dangerous areas east of the city of Rafah, or from Gaza City and the rest of the cities in the northern Gaza Strip.
Bardaa explained that the members of the Rantisi Hospital crews who were displaced to the city of Rafah agreed among themselves to distribute themselves to shelter centers inside government schools that do not receive services and assistance from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA).UNRWA), and alleviate the burden on Abu Youssef Al-Najjar Hospital, the only hospital in the city, by providing primary care to displaced patients.
With minimal capabilities, doctors deal with dozens of cases daily, and Dr. Madi says that the room is very small and does not qualify as a medical clinic, and contains only very few medicines and medical supplies, and it needs a lot to provide better care for the displaced people inside the school.
While Madi was busy examining a displaced child with his family from areas east of the city of Rafah adjacent to the Israeli security fence, he reported that the majority of sick cases suffered from gastroenteritis, chest infections, and skin diseases such as scabies and smallpox.
He explained that all of these diseases are caused by severe overcrowding, low levels of hygiene, lack of potable water, and the lack of qualified facilities within shelter centers in schools to receive these large numbers of displaced people, most of whom are children, women, and the elderly.
The father of the child Suleiman (3 years old), Subhi Adwan, told Al Jazeera Net that he gave birth to him and his twins after about 12 years of marriage, and he fears for them due to the catastrophic conditions inside the shelter centers, after he was forced to flee his family from his home east of the city, due to air strikes and Israeli artillery shelling. .
