Seriously injured Palestinians left for dead: French doctors

By Al Mayadeen English
Source: Le Monde + Le Figaro
19 Feb 2024 19:27
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Dr. Raphael Pittit describes to French media outlets his harrowing two-week experience in Gaza's health sector, which he described as the "worst ever".

A Palestinian woman mourns her martyred relatives killed in the Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip in the European Gaza Hospital in Khan Younis, the southern Gaza Strip, Palestine, January 16, 2024. (AP)

A French Doctor who worked alongside local medical colleagues in the Gaza Strip for two weeks said that what he witnessed in the territory's medical sector cannot be compared to any other warzone.

Dr. Raphael Pittit works with the Union of Medical Care and Relief Organizations to train medical staff in war zones. He, alongside around 20 other doctors, worked with the Palestinian doctors' association Palmed, for two weeks, at the European Hospital in the southern Gaza Strip. Pittit was interviewed by Le Monde upon his exit from the Strip, and he described the situation at the hospital as "mayhem".

The doctor, who is an anesthetist-resuscitator and had previously worked in former Yugoslavia, Lebanon, the Gulf, Syria, and Ukraine, affirmed that none of the previous war zones he was positioned at can compare to the situation in the Gaza Strip.

Forced to leave severely injured for the dead

Pittit stressed that the lack of medical equipment in the Gaza Strip has left the hospital non-operational.

"Sometimes the operations last for hours because we lack equipment. We lack painkillers (morphine, sedatives), the few we have are reserved for those we think will survive," he revealed.

"We have no other choice but to let the most seriously injured die without being able to relieve them because otherwise, they will take personnel, resources, beds, medicines... and that leaves less chance for [others]."

He explained that adding to the lack of medical equipment, the huge influx of Palestinian civilians forcibly displaced by Israeli forces to the hospitals further complicated the situation.

"It is a crowd locked in a narrow space, with no ability to move around, and has to search for food, water, toilets... and is subjected to violence," Pittit said about Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

In a more recent interview conducted by Le Figaro, Pittit said, "Usually civilians can flee fighting. Here it is impossible. The population has no place to protect themselves. Hundreds of thousands of people are wandering the streets in search of water and food."

He also confirmed that the hospital he worked at did not receive any military casualties and only treated civilians.

Thousands of displaced people in hospital corridors

"The presence of 25,000 people who have taken refuge in the surrounding area" were "crammed into shelters made of bits and pieces," according to Pittit. In detail, he said that 6,000 people were inside the relatively small European Hospital, which only had a capacity of 400 beds before "Israel" launched its war on the Gaza Strip.

"The wounded and their families wander around, idle and in shock. Corpses in body bags lie against a wall, waiting to be buried. Life is reorganized in a microcosm," Pittit told Le Monde.

At the time of the interview, Pittit said that only three hospitals remained functional in the southern Gaza Strip, saying that during his mission, Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis was "surrounded for 11 days by the Israeli army, preventing the passage of patients, before being evacuated definitively."

Shedding light on the direct targeting of medical staff in the Gaza Strip, Pittit said, "All of Gaza's hospital directors have been arrested by the Israeli army, interrogated, and apparently tortured under the pretext that they are pro-Hamas."