“I went thinking, oh, when I come back I'm going to be perfectly fine, but it's actually taken a lot to get over. You can't get past these memories. ”
Reporter:
After two weeks stationed at one of the last hospitals left in Gaza, this Sydney surgeon is still coming to terms with what he witnessed.
Dr. Sanjay Adusumilli:
I went thinking, oh, when I come back I’m going to be perfectly fine, but it’s actually taken a lot to get over. You can’t get past these memories.
Reporter:
Dr. Adusumilli says many patients at Al Aqsa Hospital were dying in terrible pain.
Dr. Sanjay Adusumilli:
We would be doing these horrific surgeries where you amputated legs and explored people’s abdomen and opened their chests, yet they don’t have adequate analgesia to be able to cope with afterwards, and they’d be on simple Panadol. So it was heartbreaking seeing them in agony.
Reporter:
And he can still hear the sound of parents whaling after losing their children.
Dr. Sanjay Adusumilli:
I don’t think there was a day that went by that I didn’t see children dying.
Reporter: But the trauma he saw was more than just physical. Dr. Scarlett Wong supported thousands of unaccompanied children in Gaza, now made orphans.
Dr. Scarlett Wong:
The first trauma is that they’re under bombardment, and they’re being killed and they’re seeing their family and loved one killed by bombs and by a quadcopters. The second trauma is that nobody’s doing anything about it. That they now know that the whole world knows and yet no one is stopping it.
Reporter:
For Dr. Modher Albeiruti the horrors have become hard to describe.
Dr. Modher Albeiruti:
Given the nature of those blast injuries most people will be dead on arrival. The others will be with devastating injuries that we in medicine call non-survivable injuries.
Dr. Scarlett Wong:
There’s certain types of trauma theories where you actually need your limbs to be able to do that therapy. It involves, for example, hugging yourself. There are lots of children out there who can’t even do that therapy, and that was really challenging to think about, because they literally have no way to comfort themselves.
Reporter:
On Friday the IDF said more than 250 humanitarian aid trucks were transferred into Gaza. But the UN warns the amount of aid entering has dropped by 70% since Israel began its operation in Rafah and at least 500 trucks a day are needed.
Dr. Sanjay Adusumilli:
It’s unfathomable to think that there’s children dying of starvation two kilometers away, with all this food that’s rotting just outside, and we’re letting this happen.
Reporter:All three doctors say they saw hundreds of trucks.