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Gaza- From inside the radiology room of the Indonesian Hospital, the largest medical center in the North Gaza Governorate, which serves approximately 400,000 people, the elderly Abu Ahmed Abu Zaida hopes that he will have time to undergo surgery to stabilize some of the fractures in his emaciated body that occurred due to the Israeli bombing.
Ahmed Abu Zaida told Al Jazeera Net that his father was injured in a direct bombardment on his house in the middle of Jabalia camp, and he needed surgery, but the doctors told him that his turn would be delayed a little because there were more priority cases than him.
Here, hospital residents – patients and those wounded in the Israeli aggression – await with great anxiety and fear their unknown fate in light of the power outage and repeated warnings that its work will stop due to the increased loads on the generators that operate on already scarce fuel.
Exceptional circumstances
Abu Zaida adds, “We appreciate the exceptional circumstances that the medical teams are going through, but I hope that our turn to perform the operation will come before the disaster strikes and the hospital stops working.”
Dozens of sick and wounded people are lining up for treatment in the corridors of the Indonesian Hospital, who could not find a place for themselves due to the accumulation of cases within the departments, and priority is given to the most dangerous over the least dangerous.
Al Jazeera Net toured the hospital’s departments to shed light on its disastrous conditions as the Israeli aggression continues Gaza strip For the third week in a row.
Within the hospital, which receives martyrs and injured around the clock, 184 patients with kidney failure who undergo dialysis operations throughout the week are at risk of death.
Risk of death
The power outage threatens a complete cessation of dialysis operations, which threatens the lives of these patients with the risk of inevitable death, according to the director of the Indonesian hospital, Atef Al-Kahlot, to Al-Jazeera Net.
What doubles the burden on the hospital administration is the fact that hundreds of displaced families resort to it to seek refuge from the hell of the severe Israeli bombing that Gaza City and the North Governorate are exposed to, which suffer the largest share of it.
For his part, the displaced Mahmoud Odeh told Al Jazeera Net that he and his family took refuge in the hospital to escape the Israeli bombing of the city of Beit Hanoun, which he left during the first days of the Israeli aggression.
He added that they are living in tragic conditions due to the scarcity of water and food, because the hospital is not prepared to accommodate families inside it. He expressed his hope that the war would end soon and this suffering would be put to an end.
Great scarcity of water
As for the water situation inside the hospital, it is not in a better condition than outside it, as children and young people line up in long lines hoping to fill small containers that might satisfy their thirst in light of the great scarcity, which forces them to drink unsafe water.
The majority of water desalination plants in Gaza have stopped working since the first days of the war, either due to Israeli bombing next to them or the lack of fuel needed to operate them, and residents wait long days to get a bottle of water from here or there.
The Indonesian Hospital’s mortuary is filled with the bodies of martyrs arriving successively from everywhere, and its employees and volunteers are racing against time to suffice the bodies in their hands, so that they can be free for those who come.
Next to the mortuary, the bodies of the martyrs are arranged waiting for their loved ones to be transported to the cemeteries. The same scene is repeated, as there is no space for new graves, and the solution is to double bury more than one martyr in one grave.
Repeated Mashhad
While we were inside the hospital, the surroundings were filled with the sounds of crying and wailing when the girls of the “Abu Al-Jabain” family were shocked to find the bodies of three of their relatives lying on the ground after they had died in an Israeli bombing of their house in the Al-Fakhoura neighborhood, west of the Jabalia camp. This became a recurring scene throughout the night and day of Gaza and throughout the… All around it, without exception.
With the Ministry of Health in the Gaza Strip announcing the collapse of the entire health system, the power supply to the Indonesian Hospital was completely cut off as a result of the pressure on the generators that the administration used to compensate for the electricity supply cut off from all of Gaza by the occupation army.
Al-Kahlot explains that this exceptional situation prompted the hospital administration to redistribute loads among the departments and to differentiate in connecting electricity between them to ensure the continuation of work in what is most needed, which are surgical operations and intensive care.
He added that the maximum capacity of the hospital in normal conditions is 140 beds, which forced them to double this number to more than 200 beds to accommodate the large number of infections.
fatigues
He continued, “This number can rise at any time, which increases the burden on the medical system, and reflects negatively on the quality and volume of service we provide to the wounded and sick, in light of the shortage of personnel due to the displacement of their families as a result of the widespread targeting by the occupation.”
Al-Kahlot confirmed that since the start of the aggression, medical personnel have been living in a state of severe exhaustion due to the massive and unprecedented scale of targeting, and that many of them have not left for their homes and have not seen their families, many of whom are languishing in shelter centers, which places an additional psychological burden on them.
The Ministry of Health in Gaza announced a few days ago that 7 hospitals and 21 primary health care centers were out of service due to the bombing and strict siege imposed by Israel on the Strip.
The Indonesian Hospital suffers from worsening health conditions due to the lack of medical supplies and equipment due to the large number of wounded and martyrs it receives.
Humanitarian mission
Regarding the severe shortage of medicines and medical supplies, the hospital director said, “We were talking before the current aggression that approximately 40% of medicines had a zero balance as a result of the siege, and now we have reached a deficit rate of approximately 95% in surgical and intensive care supplies.”
On the first day of the aggression, the hospital was subjected to an Israeli bombing that targeted a vehicle inside it, resulting in the death of two of its employees, according to Al-Kahlot, who the occupation army asked him – in a phone call – to evacuate the hospital, as is the case with many hospitals in Gaza.
Al-Kahlot stressed that the idea of evacuation is “a form of madness,” and that they will not abandon their humanitarian mission to heal their people, no matter what happens.
Regarding the possibility of providing the hospital with help from other hospitals, he said that other hospitals are not in better condition than the “Indonesian.” He said that it “suffers from what we suffer from, the lack of equipment and personnel, and the support among them is currently non-existent due to the expansion of the Israeli bombing in all areas of the Strip without exception.”
