Reporter:
Now, as we heard in our earlier report, Gaza is suffering critical shortages of medical supplies. Gauze is considered a vital tool in healing wounds. The irony is that this piece of cloth was invented centuries ago in the very place it’s now lacking. Gauze derives its name from Gaza, known for its rich cultural history of weaving and cloth production. It’s a thin, transparent fabric used on wounds to prevent infection and help save countless lives every day. Other Palestinian cities such as Ramallah, Hebron and Nablus are also renowned centers for weaving and spinning life-saving fabrics. Gauze was being imported from Gaza into Europe as early as the 13th century. But today, the war has left hundreds of thousands of Palestinians with undressed wounds, yearning for the supplies they created.
Joining us now on Al Jazeera is Dr. Ahmed El-Mokhallalati, who is head of the plastic surgery department at Gaza’s largest medical facility, Al-Shifa Hospital. He refused to leave his patients behind when Israel laid siege to the hospital in November. Doctor, thank you so much for being with us on Al Jazeera.
Dr. Ahmed El-Mokhallalati:
Thank you.
Reporter:
Of course, we want to hear about your experience in Al-Shifa and having to treat people with very little means at the time. But I wanted first, I guess, to hear your sentiment a year on from the start of this genocide. How do you reflect on these early days of the war? You were there with your family at the time — what was it like, not just as a doctor but on a personal level, to be there at the start of the war?
Dr. Ahmed El-Mokhallalati:
I think this genocide has just broken all the rules regarding any war in history. And I think what they have done is just starting with the worst case scenarios. So they bombed hospitals — like Al-Ahli Hospital — very early in the war, just telling everyone there are no red lines, everything can be targeted, everything can be attacked. And then the hospitals were targeted from the beginning. They wanted to achieve and reach Al-Shifa Hospital as the main target for the operation. And again, the medical staff, the healthcare workers, were targets in their own right. We never felt safe at all. And even that increased the risk — being any of the workers in the hospital. So we reached a level where being in the hospital means you are a target. We were really scared to go back to our homes just to see our families. And it happened in dozens of stories where people would be bombed immediately once they arrived home back from their work in the hospitals.
Reporter:
And the Israelis claimed that Al-Shifa was a command and control center for Hamas in Gaza. But from your experience working there, was that the case?
Dr. Ahmed El-Mokhallalati:
You know, it happened now — they reached Al-Shifa, they have seen everything in Al-Shifa. We never saw something really solid to say Al-Shifa was really a command center or something. And even Dr. Abu Salmiya, who is the director of the hospital, was interrogated, arrested, and had a really hard time. And they never found any evidence that he was in charge of anything. They had to release him after being in court three or four times, interrogated, tortured — and finally. So it’s a fact now that Al-Shifa had nothing, and we knew this from before.
Reporter:
And you, Dr. Mokhallalati, were working in Al-Shifa. You were in Gaza already when the war broke out. Your family — because you’re an Irish-Palestinian — your family was evacuated in November from Gaza, but you chose to stay. Why?
Dr. Ahmed El-Mokhallalati:
You know, my decision from the beginning — I was in London, having a good job there, a relaxed life, the kids were in school, enjoying what I’d call a comfortable life there. But then I believe always that we are under occupation as Palestinians. We have a message, we have a mission to go and to help the people. I believe the international standard of care that I learned there — I have to transfer all of this knowledge and experience to the people in Gaza. They are in bad need of all kinds of reconstructive surgery, burn management, and all this. And it was really a good experience being in Gaza for six months before the war, where I had worked very hard on the burn unit. We had a lot of partnerships with people in France, in Australia, in the UK, and they were all keen to help Gaza. So I was trying to raise the standards of medical care in plastic surgery in Gaza.
Reporter:
But how do you raise those standards that you talk about when you’re lacking the basic supplies — like gauze, for example, as we saw earlier? How were you able to help people who came to you for help at Al-Shifa Hospital?
Dr. Ahmed El-Mokhallalati:
So when we reach wartime, it’s totally another story, another experience. I’m a plastic surgeon — I had to cover orthopedic surgery in the war. For many, many cases. I had to give general anesthesia myself. We had to use one drug medication for general anesthesia instead of three or four. Most of our patients had pain untreated, they had a lot of wounds untreated. And so it was almost always that we lacked something in the care. We many times used tissue paper to cover the wounds — it’s not something we’re just talking about. We didn’t have any of the antiseptic solutions. We used sugar. I remember the first time I heard about sugar was from an ICRC documentary, and then I was checking online how we can use sugar to treat wounds. And then we used sugar, vinegar, soap to clean the wounds. We had nothing. We were running out of all the normal saline water. We had to use tap water, which was very salty — and you don’t know how clean that is — to deal with all the wounds.
We had many patients where we lost them because we knew the treatment, we knew what was supposed to be done, but having 20 bed capacity ICU in Al-Shifa and then expanding this to 70 bed capacity — that’s it. But you will have 300 patients who are in bad need of critical care. So you just watch them, and they die. The machines are not enough, the personnel are not enough, the people are not relaxed while providing the care. So it’s a lot of really sad stories. Feeling your hands are really tied — you can’t do anything for the people.
Reporter:
And as a doctor, that must be very difficult for you. Thank you so much, Dr. Ahmed El-Mokhallalati, an Irish-Palestinian surgeon who was visiting family in Gaza when the war broke out, joining us on the Al Jazeera News Hour. Thank you for sharing your experience with us.
Dr. Ahmed El-Mokhallalati:
Thank you everyone.