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A little girl cries in pain and screams, “Mama, Mama,” while the nurse stitches a wound on her head without using any anesthetic because it was not available at that time in Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.
This is how Reuters news agency began a report broadcast today about some of the suffering suffered by hospitals in the Gaza Strip, which has been targeted by the Israeli occupation with violent bombing for more than a month, not excluding homes, schools, or even hospitals.
The scene of this child is one of the painful scenes that nurse Abu Imad Hassanein spoke about as he described the suffering they are going through at a time when they are forced to deal with an unprecedented influx of wounded and the scarcity of pain-relieving medications since the start of the war in the Gaza Strip more than a month ago.
Hassanein said, “We often give the injured child sterile gauze so that he can bite on it to relieve the pain he feels, and we know that the pain he feels is higher than he imagines or higher than his age at this young age,” referring to children like the girl with a wound in her stomach. Head.
Upon arriving at Al-Shifa Hospital to change bandages and disinfect a wound on his back sustained in an Israeli airstrike, Nimr Abu Thaer, a middle-aged man, said he was not given any painkillers when the wound was originally stitched.
He added, “I kept reading the Qur’an until they finished the sewing process.”
There is no choice
The director of Al-Shifa Hospital, Muhammad Abu Salmiya, explains that with the arrival of very large numbers of infected people at one time; There is no choice but to treat them on the ground and without any drugs to adequately relieve the pain.
He gave an example of what happened immediately after the explosion that occurred in the National Arab Baptist Hospital on October 17, and said that about 250 wounded arrived at Al-Shifa Hospital, which includes only 12 operating rooms.
Abu Salamiya said, “If we had waited for this large number of wounded to end one by one, we would have lost many wounded.”
He added, “We had to work on the ground without any anesthesia, or with very simple anesthetics or very weak painkillers, so that we could save the lives of the wounded.”
Abu Salmiya continued, without going into details, that the operations performed by the medical staff at Al-Shifa Hospital in such circumstances included amputating limbs and fingers, suturing wounds, and treating serious burns.
Pain or death
The director of Al-Shifa Hospital adds that the matter is painful for the medical staff and is not simple, but they are forced to do it because the alternative to the patient’s pain may be losing his life.
At Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis, south of the Gaza Strip, the hospital director, Doctor Muhammad Zaqout, said that there was a period at the beginning of the conflict when anesthesia supplies ran out completely until aid trucks were allowed to enter.
Zaqout added, “Several operations were performed, including caesarean sections on women, without anesthesia at all. It was a very painful thing. Then we had to treat the burns without anesthesia and without a painkiller because it was not available.”
He explained that the medical teams did their best to relieve the patients’ pain with other medications that had a weaker effect, but this was not enough.
He continued, saying, “This is not the ideal solution for a patient in the operating room. We want to perform the operation on him under full anesthesia.”
During the first 12 days of the most recent conflict, aid was not allowed into Gaza. On October 21, the first convoy of aid trucks arrived from the Rafah crossing on the Gaza Strip’s border with Egypt.
Since then, several convoys have entered, but the United Nations and international relief organizations say the aid provided is nowhere near the level required to mitigate the humanitarian catastrophe.
Zaqout pointed out that although the shortage of anesthetics in Nasser Hospital has been alleviated thanks to the delivery of aid, there is still a severe shortage in Al-Shifa Hospital and the Indonesian Hospital, both of which are located in the north of the sector, which is subject to severe bombing.
