Australian doctor who volunteered in Gaza says hospital staff also starving

Australia Broadcast Center

2 days ago

An anaesthetist at a public hospital in Perth says she decided to volunteer in Gaza after seeing images of the conflict in the media.
"You just watch all these images on social media and television, and you just feel really helpless," Emma Giles said.
After a 12-hour bus journey from Amman in Jordan, stopping at numerous checkpoints, Dr Giles arrived at Al-Quds Hospital in Gaza City in mid-May.
She was only allowed to bring 3 kilograms of food with her and a limited amount of medical equipment for her four-week stay, where she lived at the hospital and worked with Palestinian medical staff.
"There are fairly strict limits on what you can take with you," she told ABC Radio Perth's Jo Trilling.
"You're allowed to take items which are for personal use only and for those that you can use in your own personal professional career.
"So I couldn't take surgical stuff in, but I could take anaesthetic stuff in."
Once at the hospital, Dr Giles got to work.
"We had some anaesthetic machines which were quite similar to what I would use in Australia, but the disposable items weren't there," she said.
"For example, [in Perth] I would put a breathing filter on my anaesthetic machine between every patient, so I don't transmit respiratory diseases, but we had none of those.
Israel stopped allowing almost all food aid into Gaza on March 2.
Dr Giles found the effect of severe food shortages was apparent in many of her patients by May.
"We'd see a lot of people, particularly children, quite malnourished, poor healing," she said.
"They would come back every two to three days to have further wash out of their really, really nasty wounds to try and prevent infection.
"We'd just do it under anaesthesia."
Dr Giles said the food shortages extended to the medical and nursing staff, who were only being given one meal a day by the hospital.
"[The local staff] are absolutely exhausted and burnt out," she said.
"They often work in multiple hospitals and do 24-hour shifts because travel is so difficult and dangerous. They choose to do longer shifts.
Since she left, Dr Giles has been told the situation has worsened.
"There is no food supplied by the hospital anymore," she said.
"They're often starving and weak during the day, often feel a bit faint while they're working, and they're absolutely desperate to keep going."
Dr Giles lost 6 kilograms during her four weeks in Gaza.
On May 26, amid international outcry about the lack of food available, an organisation backed by the United States and Israel called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) began handing out food at distribution points.
The Israeli military created long approach corridors for each of the GHF sites, and it soon became clear how dangerous they were.
"The GHF started up close to where we were, about halfway through my time there, and that's when we started getting mass casualties as a real issue in the hospital," Dr Giles said.
"They were open for maybe 10 to 15 minutes in a day, and then the people will just crowd in and get food. It's very much a survival of the fittest."
The UN reported that as of July 21, 1,054 people had been killed in Gaza while trying to get food, 766 near GHF sites.
"When they were crowding in [at GHF sites], often that would be seen as threatening by armed personnel around who would shoot them," Dr Giles said.
"If we saw people walking past the hospital carrying bags of flour, we knew that there would be mass casualties coming in soon.
"When you were operating on people, you often saw that the patients had this white ingrained flour in their hands — people who had actually managed to get food had then been wounded."
Dr Giles travelled to Gaza as a volunteer with the Palestinian Australian New Zealand Medical Association (PANZMA).