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Every day is a choice between who lives and who dies. Doctors and nurses in the Gaza Strip’s teetering hospitals, which are nearing collapse without electricity and basic supplies, say they must now decide which patients get ventilators, who gets resuscitated, or who gets any medical treatment at all. They make snap decisions amid the screams of small children undergoing amputations or brain surgeries without anesthesia or clean water to wash their wounds.
Patients arriving in cardiac arrest are not resuscitated, because medical staff choose to work on patients with a greater chance of survival instead. Some veterans of wartime medicine in Gaza say conditions inside the overcrowded and impoverished territory are the worst they have ever seen, as entire apartment blocks, schools and hospitals crumble under an Israeli bombardment. “Our teams are physically and psychologically exhausted,” said Basem al Najjar, the deputy of the head of al-Aqsa Hospital in the city of Deir al-Balah.
Doctors say they are struggling to keep their patients alive with what few medical supplies they have. Damage from air strikes and severe fuel shortages have shut down nearly half of Gaza’s hospitals entirely, while the ones with their doors still open are providing minimal care, at best. A lack of fresh water supplies and iodine has left wounds filthy, with maggots nibbling at patients’ charred and torn flesh, according to interviews with doctors at four hospitals across Gaza.
Patients arriving in cardiac arrest are not resuscitated, because medical staff choose to work on patients with a greater chance of survival instead. Some veterans of wartime medicine in Gaza say conditions inside the overcrowded and impoverished territory are the worst they have ever seen, as entire apartment blocks, schools and hospitals crumble under an Israeli bombardment. “Our teams are physically and psychologically exhausted,” said Basem al Najjar, the deputy of the head of al-Aqsa Hospital in the city of Deir al-Balah.
Doctors say they are struggling to keep their patients alive with what few medical supplies they have. Damage from air strikes and severe fuel shortages have shut down nearly half of Gaza’s hospitals entirely, while the ones with their doors still open are providing minimal care, at best. A lack of fresh water supplies and iodine has left wounds filthy, with maggots nibbling at patients’ charred and torn flesh, according to interviews with doctors at four hospitals across Gaza.
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