4:56 a.m. ET, November 2, 2023
Doctor says hospitals in Gaza are suffering ‘avalanche of human suffering’
From CNN’s Kathleen Magramo, Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, what is happening in Gaza. CNN
Doctors are struggling to treat patients with serious injuries in terrible conditions in Gaza as Israel continues to bomb the enclave, a medic with the aid group Doctors Without Borders said.
Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan from Amman, Jordan, said the lack of medical care in Gaza meant doctors were “completely deprived of all the tools of modern medicine” to treat patients – mostly women and children – with serious injuries and burns.
“Our hearts are burning. This is an avalanche of human suffering. And it’s 100% man-made,” Haj-Hassan told CNN’s Paula Newton. Doctors at the Strip’s largest Al-Shifa hospital are seeing children with most of their bodies and faces burned, missing limbs and other “catastrophic injuries,” said Haj-Hassan, a pediatric intensive care and humanitarian doctor with the aid group that is also involved is known as Doctors Without Borders.
“And doctors have to treat them with limited pain control because they’re running out of anesthetics,” she said. “We don’t have enough antibiotics to treat wound infections, we don’t have enough bandages.”
Call for a ceasefire: Haj-Hassan called for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war, saying a “halt rather than a pause” was needed in what she described as “indiscriminate bombing and massacres.”
“We lost over 130 healthcare providers, many of whom I knew personally. They lost their families,” she said.
Medical staff in Gaza are working around the clock while they and their families also fear bombings, she said. But “they refused to leave because they chose to stay with their patients,” she said.