Sean Casey, an emergency medical teams coordinator for the World Health Organization (WHO) spoke to DW about the current state of hospitals and health services in the Gaza Strip on Sunday, highlighting the precarious situation facing health service providers and civilians caught up in the war raging between Israel and the militant Islamist group Hamas.
Asked what he had seen at Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital, Casey said: “We found a hospital that’s completely overwhelmed. We saw patients coming in every 30 to 60 seconds on donkey carts, on trolleys, with very serious injuries. The hospital was previously the largest referral hospital in Gaza with 750 beds and a very busy emergency ward. At the moment, hospital leadership has indicated that they have only 5 or 6 doctors, 5 or 6 nurses and about 70 volunteers.”
Asked what could be done to alleviate suffering, he replied: “Very little, but we hope to change that.”
“Al-Shifa,” he said, “previously had 20 operating theaters, none of them are currently working. They’re running dialysis machines 24 hours a day on a backup generator. But they’re not able to come close to meeting demand.”
“What we’re seeing in all of the hospitals in Gaza is that they’re at 200, 300, even 400% of their normal capacity, and that they’re running those numbers, supporting that number of patients, with 50% or 25% of their normal personnel. Huge numbers of people here have been displaced.”
When DW asked how many of those injured were Hamas fighters and how many civilians, Casey replied: “I saw young and old, men and women… pregnant women. I saw, unfortunately, children receiving sutures, stitches, without any anesthetic. People wailing out in pain. So it doesn’t matter who these people are, they’re injured.”
Casey noted that al-Shifa was so full of patients that “there was hardly any room to walk.”
When asked what was currently needed, Casey said, “the optimal solution to this is peace… is a ceasefire.”
