![]() I’ve tried to convince them to head south, but my wife told me that we will either live or die together. My wife and six children have also stayed at the hospital with me since the violence began. Abandoning them now would be a violation of my Hippocratic oath as well as basic human decency. Most of us have chosen to remain in northern Gaza, defying the evacuation orders because we’re unwilling to leave behind our patients, for many of whom evacuation would mean certain death. My team and I have divided our time between caring for patients and locally sourcing and distributing medical supplies, food and fuel to 11 different hospitals - $1.3 million worth of resources since the violence began. In that time we’ve seen our share of tragedy, suffering and shortage, but nothing could have prepared us for the horrors of the past few weeks. I’m a pediatrician at Kamal Adwan, part of a team of nine MedGlobal doctors and humanitarian aid workers that have been on the ground in Gaza since 2018. Kamal Adwan is far from the only hospital reaching its breaking point, as doctors like myself desperately cry out for more aid to Gaza. Without an urgent resupply of fuel, the lights will go out permanently, and our hospital could turn into a morgue. When the generators fall silent, we will be relegated to practicing medieval-level medicine. Most of the tools and equipment needed to run a modern hospital like ventilators, defibrillators and our neonatal units will become useless. When the fuel runs out, we will no longer be able to function at night after the sun goes down. Lights are off most of the time, elevators are out and patients are carried between floors. We are down to the last gallons of fuel necessary to run the electric generators, despite our most stringent efforts to ration it since the start of hostilities. ![]() The people who flocked to Kamal Adwan to sleep in our hallways or even the parking lot, believing it safer than their homes, were no doubt as frightened as we were.Īs I write this, the hospital is on the precipice of true disaster. With anesthesia, iodine, alcohol, blood and even gauze running low or entirely gone, we had a dwindling supply of tools to help ease the human suffering. Some patients from the hospital explosion came in screaming in pain, but others were silent, in shock or beyond saving. We knew it would be another sleepless night, another in a string of far too many since the violence started 10 days earlier.Īs many as three to four children had to share single beds, and many more were forced to settle for the floors. By the next day, our patient roster had grown by nearly 120. 17, following the explosion at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City, we were flooded with dozens of wounded and dying victims. In the early days of the current Israel-Hamas conflict, our hospital of only 80 beds was quickly overrun. The team all too often must rush into the emergency room, all hands on deck, ready to treat shrapnel wounds, burns and blood loss. At Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, we are no strangers to treating victims of airstrikes over the years.
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