US health workers sound alarm on Gaza medical crisis

Patients in Gaza’s few standing hospitals are dying in droves from infections resulting from a lack of protective gear and soap, even when they survive their horrific blast injuries.

And health workers are facing agonising decisions, like giving up on a seven-year-old boy with extensive burns because bandages are in short supply and he’d have probably died anyway.

These are just some of the horrors witnessed by American doctors and nurses returning from the besieged Palestinian territory, who are now on a mission to spread the word about what they saw and apply pressure on Israel to allow in more life-saving supplies.

“Whether or not a ceasefire happens, we have to get humanitarian aid. And we have to get it in sufficient volumes to meet the demands,” Adam Hamawy, a former US army combat surgeon, tells AFP in an interview after a medical mission to Gaza’s European Hospital last month.

“You could give all you want, you can donate,” says the reconstructive plastic surgeon from New Jersey. “But if these borders don’t open up to allow that aid to get in, then it’s just useless.”

Hamawy has volunteered in war-torn and natural disaster-hit countries for the past 30 years, from the siege of Sarajevo to the Haiti earthquake.

“But the level of civilian casualties that I experienced was beyond anything I’d seen before,” says the 54-year-old, who helped save the life of Senator Tammy Duckworth when she lost both of her legs to a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) attack on the helicopter she was flying in Iraq.

“Most of our patients were children under the age of 14,” he stressed. “This has nothing to do with your political views.”

Hamawy and other medics told AFP they are convinced that for now their energy is better spent lobbying the halls of power to stop the offensive and require Israel to comply with international law by letting in more aid.

Israel denies allegations of international law violations during its invasion.

On a hot June afternoon in the capital Washington, Monica Johnston, a 44-year-old ICU nurse from Portland, Oregon said she conveyed specific lists of what was needed in meetings she had held with White House officials and lawmakers on Capitol Hill.