Upon returning from hospitals in Gaza, doctors tell Washington about the horrors they experienced during the ceasefire

The memories are indelible.

An avalanche of screaming families carrying their bloodied loved ones through the doors of an already flooded hospital.

A little boy trying to revive a boy who didn’t seem much older than him.

A 12-year-old boy with shrapnel wounds to the head and abdomen is intubated on the floor.

That January day at the Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, after a rocket attack on an aid distribution site, it persecuted Dr. Zaher Sahloul, an American specialist in intensive care with years of experience treating patients in war zones, including in Syria and Ukraine.

He and other volunteer doctors returning from besieged hospitals in Gaza took their first-hand accounts of the carnage to Washington this week, hoping to convey to the Biden administration and top government officials that a cease fire immediately to provide life-saving medical care.

Among the evidence Sahloul brought to U.S. officials, including members of Congress and officials at the White House, the State Department, the Department of Defense and the U.S. Agency for International Development, was a photograph of the 12-year-old boy and his death certificate.

The boy never woke up from surgery after being intubated, the doctor said, and the hospital was unable to contact his family amid a near-total communications blackout.

Two other doctors in the delegation, Amber Alayyan, deputy director of the Paris-based Doctors Without Borders program, and Nick Maynard, a British surgeon, said that solid medical progress reached by local doctors in Gaza had been erased by Israel’s war against Hamas. .

Experience

Maynard, who met British Foreign Secretary David Cameron earlier this year, said he hoped that if the United States changed its position on supporting what Israeli forces are doing in Gaza, Britain would the same.

“This is the deliberate destruction of the entire health system,” he said in an interview.

Maynard described what it was like to operate on chest wounds from blasts with little anesthetic or antibiotics at the Al-Aqsa hospital in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza, in December and January.

“The lack of pain relief was particularly concerning because we saw so many children with terrible burns,” she said.

The availability of sterile gloves and surgical drapes is also limited, and the hospital’s record-keeping capacity has collapsed, making follow-up care almost impossible.

Maynard said he walked through crowded hallways to check on patients he had operated on and sometimesI couldn’t find them.

Also in the delegation was Thaer Ahmad, a Palestinian-American emergency room doctor who was in Sahloul in January when Israeli forces surrounded Khan Younis and began approaching Nasser Hospital, the largest still operating in the enclave at the time .

He said in an interview that he had a toddler and a two-month-old baby in his Chicago home when he traveled to Gaza.

He contrasted his wife’s experience of being able to give birth in a safe, well-resourced hospital, with an obstetrician she knows well, with the plight of pregnant women in Gaza, who starve and give birth in shelters.

“I had to leave,” he said.

“They are my people.”

Shortly after the doctors left Gaza, the Nasser Hospital was raided by Israeli forces and forced to cease operations.

“I will regret leaving the country for the rest of my life,” Ahmad said.

As the death toll in Gaza has risen to nearly 32,000 in five months, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, Palestinian Americans have been “screaming at the top of their lungs and no one is listening to us,” he added.

“It’s clear that numbers don’t make a difference,” Ahmad said.

“I fear that the number of victims could reach 40,000, or 50,000, and we will find ourselves in the same situation.

“What else do I have to do?”

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