GAUZE:
The little girl cried out in pain and screamed “Mummy, Mummy” as the nurse stitched up her head wound without using anesthetic because it was not available at the time in Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.
It was one of the worst times nurse Abu Emad Hassanein could remember as he described the struggle to deal with an unprecedented influx of wounded and a shortage of painkillers since the war in Gaza began a month ago.
“Sometimes we give some of them sterile gauze (to sting) to reduce the pain,” Hassanein said.
“We know the pain they’re feeling is more than anyone would imagine, beyond what anyone at their age would be able to handle,” he said, referring to children like the girl with the head injury.
Arriving at Al Shifa to change a bandage and apply disinfectant to a wound on his back caused by an airstrike, Nemer Abu Thair, a middle-aged man, said he was given no pain relief when the wound was initially stitched.
“I kept reciting the Quran until they finished,” he said.
The war began on October 7 when Hamas fighters breached the Gaza Strip’s border fence with southern Israel.
Tel Aviv responded with an air, sea and ground assault on the densely populated enclave, which health officials in Gaza say has killed more than 10,800 Palestinians.
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Mohammad Abu Selmeyah, director of Al Shifa Hospital, said that when too many injured people were brought in at once, there was no choice but to treat them on the floor, without adequate pain relief.
He cited the immediate aftermath of an explosion at the Al Ahli Arab Hospital on October 17 as an example, when he said around 250 wounded arrived at Al Shifa, which has only 12 operating theatres.
“If we had waited to operate on them one by one, we would have lost many of the wounded,” Abu Selmeya said.
“We were forced to operate on the ground and without anesthesia or using simple anesthesia or weak painkillers to save lives,” he said.
Procedures carried out by Al Shifa staff under such conditions included amputation of limbs and fingers, suturing of severe wounds and treatment of severe burns, Abu Selmeyah said, without elaborating.
Pain or death
“It’s painful for the medical team. It’s not simple. It’s either the patient hurts or they die,” he said.
At Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, director Dr Mohammad Zaqout said there was a period since the beginning of the war when anesthetics ran out completely before aid trucks were allowed to enter.
Read also Israel steps up brutal strikes on Gaza despite calls for ceasefire
“Some operations were performed without anesthesia, including caesarean sections on women, and we also had to operate on some burns that way,” Zaqout said.
He said staff did their best to relieve patients’ pain with other, weaker drugs, but that was insufficient.
“This is not the ideal solution for a patient in an operating room, who we want to operate under full anesthesia,” he said.
In the first 12 days of the conflict, no aid was allowed into Gaza. On 21 October, the first convoy of aid trucks entered through the Rafah crossing on the strip’s border with Egypt. Since then, several convoys have flown in, but the United Nations and international aid organizations say the aid provided is nowhere near the scale needed to mitigate a humanitarian disaster.
Zaqout added that while the anesthesia shortage had eased at his own hospital thanks to aid deliveries, there were still serious shortages at Al Shifa and the Indonesian Hospital, both of which are in the heavily bombed northern part of the strip.
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