Doctors and volunteers in Gaza hospitals convey painful and shocking scenes to the victims, martyrs and wounded (Al Jazeera)
A flood of screaming families carried their bloodied loved ones through the doors of the already flooded hospital. A little boy tries to revive his peers, who doesn't look much older than him. Another, a 12-year-old, was injured by shrapnel in his head and stomach, and medical tubes were being connected to him while he was lying on the ground.
The day of January 21 at Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis in southern Gaza - following a missile attack on an aid distribution site - remains firmly in the memory of Dr. Zaher Sahloul, an American critical care specialist with years of experience treating patients in war zones, including... That's the war zones in Syria and Ukraine.
Sahloul and other volunteers who returned from besieged hospitals in Gaza brought their first-hand accounts of the carnage to Washington this week, hoping to convey to President Joe Biden's administration and senior officials that an immediate ceasefire is needed to provide life-saving medical care.
A New York Times report said that among the evidence Sahloul took to present to officials - including members of Congress and officials from the White House, State, Defense and the Agency for International Development - was a photo of a 12-year-old boy and his death certificate.
The doctor said that this child did not come out of the surgery alive after the medical tubes were connected, and the hospital was unable to reach his family amid an almost complete communications blackout.
Deliberate destruction of health care
Two other doctors in the delegation, Amber Olayan, deputy director of the Doctors Without Borders programme, and British surgeon Nick Maynard, said that the strong medical progress achieved by local doctors in Gaza had been erased by the Israeli war against the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas).
Dr Maynard, who earlier this year met his country's Foreign Secretary David Cameron, said he hoped that if the US changed its tone on supporting what Israeli forces were doing in Gaza, Britain would follow suit.
He talked about performing surgeries on chest injuries resulting from explosions using minimal anesthesia or antibiotics at Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, in December and January. "The lack of painkillers was particularly worrying because we saw so many children suffering from terrible burns," he said, considering what was happening in Gaza tantamount to "the deliberate destruction of the entire health care system."
Also included in the delegation was Thaer Ahmed, an American-Palestinian emergency physician who worked with Dr. Sahloul during the same period when Israeli forces surrounded Khan Yunis and began closing Nasser Hospital.
Ahmed said in an interview that he had a toddler and a two-month-old baby at home in Chicago when he traveled to Gaza. He compared his wife's experience of being able to give birth in a safe, well-resourced hospital with an obstetrician she knew well, and the plight of pregnant women in Gaza who are starving and giving birth in shelters.
He stated that with the number of martyrs in Gaza rising to nearly 32,000 in 5 months, according to the Ministry of Health in Gaza, the Palestinian Americans are “screaming at the top of their throats, but (but) there is no life for the one you are calling for.”
He added, "It is clear that the numbers do not make a difference. I fear that the number of martyrs will reach 40 or 50 thousand, and we will be in the same situation. What will I do then?"
Source: New York Times