GAZA STRIP (Palestine): As the Israeli counteroffensive rages in the territory of Gaza and the death toll is nearing 20,000, the injured civilians as well as the treating doctors continue to suffer hard times due to the depleting medical infrastructure and mounting toll, a report by CNN stated.
20-month-old Amir Taha lies silently on the bed, his fluffy hair sticking up, his baby-soft skin violated by a raw, jagged wound across his forehead and purple bruises swelling around one of his big brown eyes, the report stated.
“He’s an orphan now,” his aunt said, saying that his parents and two of his siblings were killed in an Israeli strike. “But he does not know that yet,” his aunt, Nehaia Al-Qadra said. “He is too young to understand.”
“They found Amir in his mom’s arms lying in the street,” Al-Qadra said. “His sister died, his brother died, his uncle and his other sister are injured in the hospital… Here we are; he doesn’t have a mother, a father or an older sister or brother. Now it’s just us two and God,” CNN quoted her as saying.
Amir is recovering from his physical wounds at a field hospital in Rafah, in southern Gaza, set up by the United Arab Emirates government.
His aunt described an incident where Amir started screaming after looking at a nurse who resembled his father.
“Yesterday he saw a nurse that looked like his dad, and he kept screaming, ‘Dad! Dad! Dad!’” Al-Qadra said. She added that Amir is calm after being shown a video of his father.
Israel launched a strong counteroffensive, targeting the terror units in Gaza, after Hamas terrorists carried out a horrific terror attack breaching the Israeli borders, killing over 1200 people and holding around 240 as hostages.
Amir’s loss adds to the overwhelming human toll in the tiny territory of Gaza, where more than 19,000 people have been killed, according to the Hamas-run Ministry of Health in Gaza.
With local hospitals overwhelmed by the sick and injured looking for help from facilities that have been damaged or destroyed, the UAE operation is a rare functioning, well-equipped, well-staffed place that can offer help to the most serious cases, CNN reported.
The report also stated that eight-year-old Jinan Sahar Mughari was immobilised in a full-body cast in another room.
“They bombed the house in front of us and then our home,” she said. “I was sitting next to my grandfather, and my grandfather held me, and my uncle was fine, so he was the one who took us out.”
Her mother, Hiba Mohammed Mughari, who was not there at the time of the attack, said that Jinan’s skull and leg were broken in the bombing. “I went to the hospital to look for her…I came here, and I found her here,” she added.
The report further highlighted that the condition of the injured has also taken a toll on the doctors at the UAE Field Hospital, who said that they find seeing and treating the innocent child victims of war “especially hard,” but they are so busy they cannot dwell on it.
“It’s something that changes your heart,” Dr Ahmed Almazrouei said of seeing injured children.
The hospital’s medical director, Dr Abdallah Al-Naqbi, added: “These are obviously civilians. They don’t deserve to lose [a] limb while sitting with family,” he said.
The report further stated that the volunteer medics are on call 24/7 and work long hours, sometimes starting at three in the morning and staying awake till late afternoon.
“Yesterday we started (at) three in the morning. Four injuries. No amputations but burns. Burns are worse than amputations,” Al-Naqbi said. “And we stayed awake until late afternoon,” Al-Naqbi said.
Dealing with trauma victims is central to the medics’ work under the mission, dubbed ‘Operation Gallant Knight 3’.
But the medics are also seeing the consequences of the local health systems falling apart and the poor, crowded conditions that are leading to infectious diseases and other problems sweeping through communities, CNN reported.
“Someone came with an injury to his head and worms coming out of the wound,” Al-Naqbi said. “We can’t explain what kind of environment they were exposed [to], and medically, I can’t explain how dirty that situation was. Even our surgeon was shocked.”
He told about the notes handed over from the paramedics–who had wheeled in a man and a 13-year-old boy, both with missing limbs–were smeared with blood.
Both patients are perilously injured, and the teams work quickly to replace the bandages that are being used as improvised tourniquets.
“Not a single patient came to me with a proper tourniquet,” Al-Naqbi said, explaining that properly stopping blood loss was critical to saving lives.
According to the Israeli military, it has hit more than 22,000 targets in Gaza–an enclave just about 25 miles long and seven miles wide–far surpassing anything seen in modern warfare in terms of intensity and ferocity, according to CNN.
Initially, Israel targeted the north and then the south of the Gaza territory in its operations to destroy Hamas and recover more than 100 hostages still believed to be held by militants.
The ongoing conflict has resulted in almost all of Gaza’s more than 2 million residents being forced from their homes, the World Health Organisation said.
The report also stated about 20-year-old Lama Ali Hassan Alloush, who was an engineering student and was preparing for her sister’s wedding.
Her family followed the Israeli orders, left their home in the north and fled to the south. But the house where they were seeking shelter was hit by a strike, since she is in the hospital with her right leg amputated, CNN reported.
“The world isn’t listening to us,” she said. “Nobody cares about us; we have been dying for over 60 days, dying from the bombing, and nobody did anything.” (ANI)
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