'Kids scream in pain as we operate without painkillers’

With only a third of Gaza’s hospitals still open, Bel Trew speaks to medical staff working in a destroyed health system

- Bel Trew

Graphic content warning: the story contains details that some readers may find disturbing With no other choice, Palestinian doctors braced themselves as they began to amputate the right leg of a three-year-old child in Gaza without anaesthetic. Watching in horror was an American medic and volunteer who could only pray the screaming toddler would pass out from the pain.

Every day, medics had to operate on or stitch up as many as 30 children without proper pain relief. Some patients would have to be held down. These horrific scenes took place at Abu Yousef alNajjar hospital in Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah in April: just a few weeks before, hospital staff were forced to evacuate and close the hospital when Israeli forces seized control of the area and a nearby aid crossing.

Before this, al-Najjar was one of the few remaining medical centres left functioning in the area. But it was completely overwhelmed by the influx of wounded and running out of supplies, including painkillers.

Zena Saleh is a general surgery resident in New Jersey in the US. Earlier in the year she answered calls from medical charities for volunteers to travel to Gaza and assist with the unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe unfolding. As a medical resident, she had expected she might be called on to change dressings, assist surgeons or even mop floors. When she arrived at al-Najjar, she realised that most of the team left were general practitioners or medical students trying to work under constant fire with little to no medicines. The attacks on Gaza’s healthcare system and personnel had decimated the response, she says.