What the Israeli military calls a “limited operation” in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip has already had devastating consequences over the past two days for medical workers and patients across the enclave, doctors and advocacy groups say. humanitarian aid.
The Israeli army’s orders for approximately 110,000 people to leave eastern Rafah on Monday spread fear throughout the Abu Yousef al-Najjar hospital, which is within the area where Israel said it would act with “extreme force,” said Dr. Marwan al-Hams, director of the hospital. director, said in a telephone interview Tuesday.
Fearing a raid by Israeli forces, like those that have been carried out on hospitals across Gaza, al-Najjar’s medical staff rushed to relocate more than 200 patients. Some patients left in cars secured by their relatives, while the seriously injured were taken by ambulance to other hospitals in southern Gaza, including the European Hospital in Khan Younis and the International Medical Corps field hospital in Rafah.
But even during the struggle to evacuate the hospital, Israeli airstrikes on Rafah continued. The bodies of 58 people killed in Israeli strikes arrived at the hospital since Sunday, Dr. al-Hams said, adding that hospital staff had to ask the victims’ families to bury the bodies themselves.
“The situation is not dangerous; “The situation is catastrophic, catastrophic, catastrophic,” he stated.
The Israeli military’s actions also immediately limited access to more basic health services throughout Rafah. Project HOPE, a US-based aid group that operates several clinics throughout Gaza, was forced to close a mobile medical unit within the area from which Israel has told people to leave. He had been providing primary care in the eastern part of Rafah and treating upper respiratory tract infections and gastrointestinal diseases that had been spreading among displaced Palestinians crowded into shelters with little access to clean water and sanitation facilities.
The aid group also had to close another medical clinic elsewhere in Rafah, outside the evacuation zone, early on Monday because six of its medical workers, including a general practitioner, a gynecologist and nurses, were living inside or immediately next to where the Israeli army was located. said it would begin operations, said Chessa Latifi, deputy director of emergency preparedness for Project HOPE.
Many of the medical workers had already been displaced from their homes in Khan Younis and Gaza City and were forced to flee once again with their families, including dozens of children, this time along with the patients they had been treating at the this one from Rafah.
At least two delegations of doctors trying to enter Gaza on Monday to support struggling hospitals in the northern part of the enclave were forced to return as the security situation deteriorated, even before the Israeli army took control of the Rafah crossing on Tuesday.
A delegation of Jordanian doctors, organized by Project HOPE, aimed to reach Kamal Adwan Hospital in the far north of Gaza to relieve overwhelmed medical staff and deliver much-needed supplies, including anesthetics, surgical sutures and gauze. That delegation was also supposed to deliver the salaries of the aid group’s medical workers in Rafah — cash they desperately needed to secure lodging and transportation during the chaotic evacuation.
“We have had contingency plans for a long time, especially when it became increasingly clear that the offensive in Rafah was going to begin,” Ms. Latifi said. But “the consequences of what is happening continue to grow,” she said.
Another delegation of medical workers, organized by the aid group MedGlobal, was halfway from Cairo to Rafah on Monday when they began receiving alerts of The World Health Organization’s coordination team warned that the Rafah crossing could soon be closed.
The doctors tried to continue on their way. But once they were told that the border crossing closure was imminent, “most of us realized that what was going to happen was going to be significant,” said Dr. John Kahler, co-founder of MedGlobal.
The delegation included an anesthesiologist and a midwife who were to support Al-Awda Hospital, one of the few hospitals that can still provide maternal care to pregnant women. Dr. Kahler himself intended to go to Kamal Adwan, where his organization opened a nutritional stabilization center for malnourished children over the weekend.
Speaking from Cairo on Tuesday, Dr. Kahler described the difficult decision to disband the delegation. If this were the start of the long-threatened ground assault, he said, moving into northern Gaza from Rafah would have been too dangerous, even if medics had been able to get through the Rafah crossing on Monday.
The level of anxiety is “through the roof” among team members and their Palestinian partners inside Gaza as they wait to see what will happen next, Dr. Kahler said.
“Babies will continue to be born; injuries will continue to occur; People are going to continue dying,” he added.