When the Israeli bomb fell, the injured child was overwhelmed. Dozens of people died

Cairo (AP) – When the first explosion occurred in Gaza around 1:30 a.m. this week, a visiting British doctor went to the balcony of a hospital in Khan Younis and watched the stripes of missiles that night before slamming the city. A Palestinian surgeon next to him gasped, “Oh no. Oh no.”

Two months after the ceasefire, the horror of Israel’s bombing came back. Senior surgeons told visiting doctor Sakib Rokafiya that they would better go to the emergency ward.

The torn body was soon aired in the arms of an ambulance, a donkey cart or a horrifying relative. The shocked doctor is the number of children.

“The child is a child, young patients are young patients,” Rocafia said. “The vast majority are women, children, and elderly people.”

This is the start of a 24-hour mess at Nasser Hospital, the largest hospital in southern Gaza. Israel has broken the ceasefire and started with a surprise resilience since mid-January, the barrage began in the early hours of Tuesday with the aim of putting pressure on Hamas to release more hostages and accept changes in truce conditions. It turned into one of the deadliest days of the 17-month war.

According to the region’s health ministry, the air strike killed 409 people across Gaza, including 173 children and 88 women, and hundreds were injured, with fewer than differentiating between activists and civilians.

More than 300 casualties were flooded to Nasser Hospital. Like other medical institutions around Gaza, it was damaged by Israeli raids and strikes throughout the war without critical equipment. It also lacks antibiotics and other essentials. On March 2, when the ceasefire expired in the first, six-week phase, Israel blocked the entry of drugs, food and other supplies in Gaza.

Classification

The emergency wards at Nasser Hospital are filled with wounded wards, both in Palestinian charitable medical assistance in a scene described to the Associated Press by American pediatricians Rokafiya and Tanya Haj-Hassan. The injured people came from a tent camp, shelter, the missiles burned and hit the houses from Khan Yunis and Rafa in the south.

A nurse tries to recover from a boy, shrapnel flashing in her heart. A young man walked away with his arms, sat nearby, trembling. A barefoot boy was about 4 years old and his feet were blown up. There is blood, bones and tissue everywhere on the floor.

“I was overwhelmed, from corner to corner, trying to find out who is going to the operating room, who declares an irrescueable case,” Haj-Hassan said.

“It’s a very difficult decision and we have to make it multiple times,” she said in the voice message.

Wounds are easy to miss. A little girl seemed OK – she told Haj-Hassan when she breathed that it was just a bit of pain – but when they took off their clothes, they were sure she was bleeding into her lungs. Haj-Hassan discovered shrapnel in her head through the curly hair of another girl.

Rokafiya said huddling two to three people on the Gurneys at a time and then catching up with the surgery.

He scratches the notes on the note or directly on the patient’s skin – this is the surgery, it is the scan. He wrote his name when possible, but many children were brought in by strangers and parents died, injured or lost in chaos. Therefore, he often writes: “Unknown.”

In the operating room

Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, an American trauma surgeon from California, rushed to the area with medical charity Medglobal, where the hospital still sees the worst patients as being saved.

But the first little girl he saw – 3 or 4 years old – was too far away. Her face was entangled with shrapnel. “Technically, she is still alive, but there are many other casualties and there is nothing we can do about it,” Sidhwa said.

He told the girl’s father that she was going to die. Sidhwa continued about 15 operations.

Palestinian surgeon Khaled Alserr and Irish volunteer surgeons do the same. A 29-year-old woman had her pelvis smashed and the veins around her bones were bleeding heavily. They did everything possible during the surgery, but she died in the ICU.

Sidhwa said he had a 6-year-old boy in his heart with two holes, two holes in his colon and three in his belly. They repaired the holes and restarted his heart after he entered cardiac arrest.

He also died a few hours later.

“They died because the ICU simply has no ability to take care of them,” Sidhwa said.

Ahmed Al-Farra, head of the pediatric and obstetrics department, said that this is partly due to the lack of powerful antibiotics in the ICU.

Sidhwa recalled his performance at the Boston Medical Center when the Boston Marathon bombing occurred in 2013, killing three people and sending about 260 people injured to regional hospitals.

Boston Medical “cannot handle the large number of cases seen by Nasser Hospital”, he said.

Staff

Rokafiya marveled at how hospital staff took care of each other under coercion. Workers distribute water and drink from doctors and nurses. The cleaner whips bloody clothes, blankets, tissues and medical debris that have accumulated on the floor.

Meanwhile, some staff members met their own family members during the strike.

Palestinian surgeon Alserr had to go to the morgue to identify the bodies of his wife’s father and brother.

“The only thing I see is a pack of meat and bones, melting and rupturing,” he said in his voice message.

Another staff member lost his wife and children. Haj-Hassan said an anesthesiologist – his mother and 21 other relatives were killed in the war – later learned that his father, his brother and cousin were killed.

as a result of

Al Farra said about 85 people died at Nasser Hospital, including about 40 children aged 1 to 17.

The strike continued throughout the week, killing more people. Among those killed Tuesday, there are at least six famous Hamas characters.

Israel said it will continue to target Hamas, asking it to release more hostages, although Israel ignored the ceasefire demands because it first ended the war for a long time. Israel said it did not target civilians and blamed Hamas on their deaths because it operates in the population.

With Tuesday’s bombing, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also secured the government of his right-wing party, demanding a resumption of war and solidifying his alliance ahead of a major budget vote, which could have disappointed him.

Haj-Hassan constantly checks on children in Nasser ICU. The girl with shrapnel in her mind still couldn’t move her right side. Her mother came to her, snuggled from her wound, and told Haj-Hassan that the little girl’s sister was killed.

“I can’t handle or understand the scale of mass killings and massacres in sleep we’re seeing here,” Haj-Hassan said. “It can’t be the world we live in.”

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Julia Frankel, AP correspondent in Jerusalem, contributed to the report.