April 29, 2024. Living in exile.

‘We hate Hamas like we hate Israel’  The Times of Israel, Smadar Perry interview

May 8, 2024. A message from Rafah.

“Displaced in a different place. Still in Rafah.

Sad week and days. One of my sisters passed away, and another lost two of her children. Killed in Rafah, and her third child is seriously wounded.”

Jason Burke, Malak A Tantesh, The Guardian, May 8, 2024

Rafah hospitals in danger of being overwhelmed, say Gaza doctors

Netta Ahituv, Haaretz, May 9, 2024

The Chilling Testimony of a U.S. Neurosurgeon Who Went to Gaza to Save Lives

“The first thing you see in Rafah,” he relates, “is miles and miles of hanging fabrics – the tents of the displaced people, which are erected against the background of the ruins of buildings. When you turn onto Saladin Road, which is the main road connecting Gaza’s north and south, suddenly you see an ocean of people. These are the displaced people who live there now. As you get closer to the hospital, you see more and more people, and more and more tents.”

The water situation there worries me the most, and since returning for the first time, I have talked about water sanitation everywhere and with everyone I can. We lost many patients due to water-related infections.”

“In the process, we discovered that there weren’t enough anesthetics, not enough equipment and not even clean water to wash our hands between operations. Sometimes there were no gloves and sometimes we lacked basic medicines. We were compelled to perform limb amputations without anesthetics and C-sections without sedatives. In order to do as much as we could, we would operate on two patients at the same time in the same operating room.”

“During the night, it was not possible to rescue anyone from the ruins, both because there was no electricity and everything was dark, and also because just being outside was dangerous. So people who were wounded during the night remained where they were until morning. Many of them died from loss of blood or reached us in worse condition because they did not receive immediate treatment. Every morning around 8, a wave of wounded people arrived who had been rescued from the ruins of the night. At that point, around nine out of 10 of them could not be saved.

 “From a medical point of view, I remember a boy of maybe 12 or 13 years old, who arrived with bleeding from his eye, from being hit by shrapnel. It was clear that he needed surgery, but there was a two-hour line for the operating room. During the wait, a main artery burst inside his brain and blood began spurting from his eye. I’d never seen anything like that before. He died, of course.

“From a humanitarian point of view, I remember a boy about 2 years old who was seriously hurt by a bomb. He arrived together with many other children who had been in the same house. The moment I saw him I knew we would not be able to save him, so I had to give the only oxygen canister that was available to another wounded child, who had a better chance of surviving. He was alone, with no one by his side as he was dying. I took a picture of him with the phone and went out to see if anyone knew his relatives. I was told that his whole family was buried under the ruins, and that he was the only one who had been pulled out. I decided that this child would not die without someone noticing and crying over him, and I realized that it would have to be me. I held him to me, I cried over him and I named him ‘Jacob.’ I vowed that if I have a son, I will name him ‘Jacob’ in his memory.” 

The noise of a one-ton bomb is deafening. The first time one was dropped nearby, I happened to be standing on a stool, and I fell off, because the building shook so hard. It went on like that every five or 10 minutes. I asked the local doctors what to do, and they told me that you get used to it and that I should just keep working to distract myself from the anxiety.”

…/…“That’s how I came to understand that it wasn’t enough to bring food, water and medical equipment to Gaza. It’s also necessary to bring into being authority figures to organize the distribution. That’s another one of my projects now: to bring apolitical organizations into Gaza, groups that won’t deal with cease-fires and agreements, but only with organizing and managing the distribution of humanitarian aid.”

August 19, 2024. We shall not forget. Causes and effects.