Perth anaesthetist describes her harrowing experience in a Gaza hospital

Australia Broadcast Center

5 days ago

Perth anaesthetist Emma Giles recently returned from Gaza, where she spent a month work with local staff.
Dr Giles told Jo Trilling on ABC Radio Perth that the medical staff in Gaza are "absolutely exhausted and burnt out".
Dr Giles worked at the al-Quds Hospital during her recent deployment in Gaza — which had reopened a few months prior to her arrival after being damaged "quite significantly in air strikes and tank fires".
"[Medical staff] have been working nonstop for months and months now, even though this hospital's only just reopened," Dr Giles said.
"They never know if they're going to wake up in the morning or if their family are going to be alive when they get back from work."
When she got there she says she found the hospital's operating theatre had been completed destroyed with the cardiac catheterisation lab made into a makeshift operating theatre.
"It was was quite a jarring mix," Dr Giles said.
"So some of it was exactly what I'd have in Perth, but then you'd have stuff that I would have been struggling with in the 90s."
Hunger grows
"We [medical staff] sew a lot of people, particularly children, quite malnourished, poor healing, and 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," Dr Giles said.
Ms Giles said medical staff often feel faint while working from lack of food yet they remain "desperate to keep going".
"It's heartbreaking," Ms Giles said.
'Survival of the fittest'
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), is US and Israel backed operation that has taken over distribution of food from the UN and other aid agencies that had been working in the strip.
Dr Giles said that she saw many patients who were injured seeking food from GHF distribution points.
"The patients would come in with either gunshot wounds, explosion wounds, or because they had been trying to get at the vehicles, they'd been run over," Dr Giles said.
"When you're operating on people, you often saw that the patients had this white ingrained flour in their hands.
"So, the people who had actually managed to get food had then been wounded.