Every day is a choice between who lives and who dies.
Doctors and nurses in Gaza’s teetering hospitals, which are nearing collapse without electricity and basic supplies, say they must now decide which patients get ventilators, who gets resuscitated, or who gets any medical treatment at all. They make snap decisions amid the screams of small children undergoing amputations or brain surgeries without anesthesia or clean water to wash their wounds.
Some veterans of wartime medicine in the Gaza Strip say conditions inside the overcrowded and impoverished territory are the worst they have ever seen, as entire apartment blocks, schools and hospitals crumble under an Israeli bombardment that has meted out a devastating civilian toll.
“Our teams are physically and psychologically exhausted,” said Basem al Najjar, the deputy of the head of Al Aqsa Hospital in the city of Deir al Balah in central Gaza.
“Some doctors remain a whole week in the hospital. Some of their families are brought to the hospital killed or injured. And some doctors go home and are killed there,” and then the bodies are brought back to the hospital, he said. He added that three of the hospital’s staff members had died at home, under Israeli military bombardment.
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