Regardless of an Israeli risk that their hospital can be bombed, the medical doctors of Al Awda simply preserve saving lives.
Gaza Metropolis – Dr Nisreen al-Shorafa has gotten barely 10 hours of sleep over the previous seven days.
The 30-year-old surgeon runs the emergency room at Al Awda Hospital in Tal al-Zaatar, between Beit Lahia and Beit Hanoun, and he or she can’t recall a time when she has labored more durable.
Devoted utterly to serving to save the individuals who survived the relentless Israeli bombing, she has pushed herself past what she thought she may do.
On Saturday, the hospital began receiving warning calls from the Israeli navy. The message was stark and ominous: The hospital needed to be evacuated as a result of it might be bombed.
“I’ll wager they [Israeli army] are pleased with themselves, threatening to bomb the hospital,” stated resident nurse Asala al-Batsh.
“They insisted that everybody and every little thing transfer. All hospital personnel, all of the sufferers, together with these within the ICU, and the our bodies within the morgue.”
After making an attempt to elucidate to the Israeli military on the cellphone the inhumanity and impossibility of transferring everybody out of the hospital and southward, the staff gave up.
“We determined to not go away,” al-Shorafa stated.
“The hospital’s board of administrators haven’t any approach to know if we’re going to be bombed or not. However they’re positive that we’re doing the correct factor.
“We’re completely proper to heed the decision of responsibility; as medical doctors, as nurses, all of us have to unite at occasions like this.”
Al Awda means ‘The Return’
Along with working across the clock to deal with all of the injured individuals who have come by way of the doorways, the hospital has opened its doorways to these fleeing the destruction and searching for what they hope is a secure place to shelter.
Many individuals are afraid to heed Israel’s demand that they head south as a result of convoys of evacuating folks have been hit, and everybody within the hospital – medical doctors, sufferers, medics – is afraid that in the event that they attempt to go away they are going to be killed on the highway.
And they also huddle collectively, sleep disadvantaged and operating dangerously low on meals and water.
The hospital says it has been receiving help from folks residing round it who’re bringing in meals and primary provides for the sufferers and folks in search of refuge.
“Working in a hospital, we hardly have time to eat on a standard day, so it’s undoubtedly not our precedence proper now,” one other nurse stated, explaining that any help is used for the sufferers.
The entire hospitals within the Gaza Strip are stretched a number of occasions past capability, to the purpose that sufferers are mendacity within the corridors and lifeless our bodies need to be saved in refrigerated meals or ice-cream vans and lined up on the sidewalks earlier than burial as a result of the morgues are so full.
The Palestinian Ministry of Well being has urged the worldwide neighborhood to intervene a number of occasions, however no response or help has come.
“We’re doing as a lot as we are able to, however there are main shortages, particularly within the emergency room, which is our first line of response to folks coming in. We’re the road between life and dying typically,” al-Shorafa stated.
“We work so arduous,” she stated, her voice breaking. “We do completely every little thing we are able to, however then typically a affected person will die … it appears like so many individuals die each single day for the reason that starting of this struggle.
“It’s so arduous, we really feel completely helpless,” she stated as a tear made its sluggish manner down her exhausted cheek.
![Mourners pray over the shrouded bodies of members of the Agha family, killed in an Israeli strike in Khan Yunis in the Gaza Strip,](https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/33YA8KV-highres-1697300039.jpg?w=770&resize=770%2C513)