Alarming situation in southern Gaza hospitals, doctors: We are forced to decide who should die!

Hospital in Gaza

In the crowded corridors of the European hospital in Khan Younis, exhausted doctors decide who among the huge influx of patients coming from northern Gaza should live or die.

Hundreds of casualties have moved south in recent days following the evacuation of hospitals in Gaza City, and medical staff are already struggling with acute shortages of medicine, dwindling food rations and disrupted power and communications. The injured have joined thousands of displaced people seeking shelter and safety at medical facilities.

Paul Ley, an orthopedic surgeon at the European hospital, said displaced people were sleeping in elevators, a small team was working around the clock in four operating theaters to amputate infected limbs that had gone days without treatment and there was an acute shortage. of sedatives.

Triage decisions had to be made immediately, which, in one case, meant that a 12-year-old child died with only palliative care in order to conserve dwindling resources. Ley said the hospital had received 500 patients evacuated from hospitals in northern Gaza in recent days.

"Many of them have not received treatment for nine or 10 days because the hospitals there were non-functional even if they were open. This is the situation that is happening here now. This is a functioning hospital, but we are overwhelmed. There is nowhere to evacuate… There is no escape route. We are probably one of the last lines of defense," Ley stated.

There are 78 patients in the burns unit of the European hospital, almost two-fifths of them children under five years old. Another problem is the lack of anesthetics and painkillers, and Dr. Ley admits that operations are performed with minimal anesthesia, there is a lack of analgesics, which makes the work very difficult for sick patients. (A2 Televizion)