Four Palestinian sisters, each younger than 12, were rushed into the only functioning hospital left in central Gaza with gunshot wounds from an Israeli drone.
One girl lost her arm. Two underwent surgery to save their legs. The other died.
These were among the first cases three medical professionals from Orange County witnessed last month when they visited Gaza as part of a life-saving volunteer mission.
Carrying suitcases filled with medical supplies and medications, Dr. Haifaa Younis, an OB/GYN, Dr. Jawad Khan, a hand surgeon, and Omar Sabha, an operating room nurse, made the journey to Gaza to help provide medical care in any way they could.
They recently returned and, this week, shared what they saw with the world.
Part of what they recounted was about has been well publicized. Since Oct. 7, when Hamas militants attacked Israel, killing 1,139 people, mostly civilians, and taking an estimated 253 hostages, Israel’s military response in the Gaza strip has been relentless. The most pressing result of that violence has been loss of life; more than 34,000 people in Gaza have been killed in the past seven months, mostly women and children. More than 450 of the people killed in Gaza were healthcare workers.
But the three volunteers also focused on something that’s obvious but not as widely covered; the destruction of Gaza’s medical infrastructure.
A small network of modern hospitals in pre-war Gaza has been reduced to a string of mostly damaged buildings, improvised medical work, and luck, both good and bad. Trained medical professionals in Gaza work relentlessly to save desperately injured people, using make-shift equipment in conditions that are decidedly unsanitary, and with medicine — when they have it — that often isn’t appropriate for the job at hand.
Omar Sabha, a local OR nurse, visited Gaza for 11 days assisting with medical care. (Photo Courtesy of Omar Sabha)
The three locals, Younis, Khan and Sabha, were part of a team of medical professionals who joined in that effort from April 1 through April 11. They were in Gaza as volunteers with Humanity Auxilium, a nonprofit that provides humanitarian aid all over the world.
They started their trip in Cairo, Egypt. After getting their passports checked, they spent the next 14 hours in a drive on the road to Gaza, a ride that pre-war would taken about 5 hours. Along the way they went through several checkpoints and passed miles of trucks, vehicles filled with medical supplies and food that would help the people in Gaza. But the trucks, they said, were parked and unable to roll into Gaza; whatever aid they might hold wasn’t being allowed in.
“The roads are decimated,” Sabha said. “There are potholes every 20 or 30 feet, so you never drive in a straight line, you’re always zig-zagging, in and out.
“And it’s pitch dark … The oppression forces have cut out all the electricity to the city, so you don’t know where you’re going.
“There’s also that fear of the unknown playing a big factor.”
Dr. Jawad Khan, a local hand surgeon, visited Gaza for 11 days assisting with medical care. (Photo Courtesy of Omar Sabha)
When they arrived at Al-Aqsa Hospital, Younis said they encountered four types of people — patients, family of patients, medical staff and, mostly, people who were displaced with nowhere else to go. The World Health Organization, among others, estimates that more than one million people from Gaza have been displaced as a result of Israel’s military response to Oct. 7.
Inside what was left of the hospital, people filled the hallways, some on beds and many others on the ground. Tents were set up throughout the facility, an attempt to create make-shift medical rooms for an ever-rising number of wounded.
And all day, every day, the medics said, work was done against the background of an insect-like humming — the sound of Israeli drones.
Khan and Sabha had never worked in a war zone before. Younis said she was in Iraq when the region was bombed during the first Gulf War, in 1991, but the horror and destruction she witnessed there was minor compared with the current state of Gaza.
They noted that while Gaza’s healthcare system is “in shambles,” the region’s pre-war sanitation infrastructure is even worse, essentially obliterated. As a result, they said, flies and mosquitoes are rampant, buzzing into operating rooms even during surgeries. Khan said doctors in Gaza are seeing a 50% infection rate in patients from the inability to keep wounds clean, lack of post-op care, or both.
And the infection rate is just one of many challenges.
“They’re dealing with chronic pain,” Khan said. “There are all these amputees, everywhere.”
The volunteers noted that their counterparts, the residents who work in the hospitals, aren’t just doctors and nurses and support staff. They’re also mothers and fathers and children. Caring for the flood of wounded — people who sometimes are their neighbors and friends — is only part of their pain.
“They’re all still overworked and tired and exhausted,” Khan said.
A handful of local doctors traveled to Gaza last month to provide essential medical care to the community. The team from left, Dr. Haifaa Younis, Dr. Jawad Khan and nurse Omar Sabha stayed in Gaza for 11 days. (Photo by Michael Kitada, Contributing Photographer)
The shortage of medicine, and the destruction of medical equipment, contributed to horrific outcomes — including amputations — that otherwise might’ve been prevented.
“We were seeing a plastic surgeon making surgical cuts with scissors that were too big. You can’t really make precise cuts with those kinds of instruments,” Sabha said. “Amazingly, that guy was able to do so.”
Sabha added this: “Need is a driver for innovation.”
In the view of the volunteers, the bombing campaign in Gaza has destroyed more than homes and infrastructure. The violence has left little for the nation’s future.
“You have residents who had a very good medical school I was told. (But) there is no more training. There is no more medical school,” Younis said.
“The questions I always had as I was walking around, why do you bomb a medical school? Why do you bomb a hospital? Why do you bomb schools, actually, especially when the schools became shelters?”
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The three medics remain in contact with colleagues and patients in Gaza, and all three have signed up to go back.
But, as of Tuesday, May 7, they don’t know when that will be.
They said Israel’s military push against the Rafah border crossing has had an unexpected consequence: Several doctors from Southern California are stuck in the battle zone.
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