Dr. Marwan Abusada, surgeon and MOF. He describes the situation at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City in a tour of the emergency room. The video was taken a few days ago. The situation is many times worse now.
We are in Shifa Hospital, this is the 14-day of aggression on Gaza. Shifa Hospital is the largest hospital in Palestine, with a capacity of more than 700 beds. As you see here, Shifa is overwhelmed with patients, with injured people. It is not only with injured people, but also it is overwhelmed with the displaced people from the crated area, the area of destruction. As you see here, the shelters for these people, who are occupying each square meter in the Shifa Hospital, also inside the building, where they are placed in the corridors between the departments and units, and also sometimes we see them inside the departments. We have more than 14,000 displaced people located now in Shifa Hospital. We are going to our emergency department to see the casualties and the floods of patients inside. The people are making the shelters here also in front of our emergency departments. Some people are starting to make coffee for the people who are around here. Again, this is an unhealthy situation, but what can we do? This is a specialty building, and this is the original building for orthopedic and general surgery. We have patients who have been placed in all of the hospital. We also shifted to the medical building behind this building, and also to the… We have placed more patients there. Now we have more than 550 patients, injured people, I mean if you combine all of the surgical buildings in the place to all the medical beds. This person here in front of us, he is a doctor in the physiotherapy. He has a master degree of physiotherapy, and he is on his way to the patients in front. Even if we are dealing with mass casualties, we cannot control the crowd from entering our emergency department. This area on the left side is supposed to be a fast-track area. We move the beds inside, and we are treating mild cases in this unit. We have a doctor and nurses taking care of this unit now. The area is full of patients as you see here. Now, please come with me. This is the main resuscitation area of our emergency department with 10 beds capacity. We don’t have more regular emergency beds. We use the normal beds because our emergency beds are occupied by our patients in the departments. So, these are the regular beds now. We have placed people in a mechanical ventilation area because we don’t have a vacant place in our ICU. So, temporarily, they are placed here until we evacuate a patient from the ICU. Also, another patient from a ventilator here. And another guy, he is on a ventilator, he is still waiting. It is not an ICU. This is a resuscitation area for the emergency department. But still, we are dealing as ICU now. This is a freshly injured case. Yes, come with me. Our emergency department is overwhelmed with patients. They need to be admitted but we don’t have enough place to place them. So, they are still staying here in the emergency department. How many patients have we got here? We have a patient here. We are here. Look at that. In the corridors, we have many patients still there. We have got two patients here. Also, two patients in one place. This patient should be admitted to the hospital. We will keep them as they like in the ward. This is the emergency department. Here in the corridors. Here. You see that. Every place here is full of patients as you see here. Every place, supposed not to have any patients in this place, but we have plenty of them. This patient, look at this face. I am sorry. Still, it is very crowded here, as you see. We have got here today more than 17 people killed. Many injured people when they attacked the church. The day before they attacked the Rahli Arab Hospital. The church and the Rahli, are in close proximity to each other. and between them more than 17 people, they were Christian, who were being killed. There is no difference between Christian and Muslim in this area. And the Israelis attack any people who are not Jewish. This is a very critical situation and a challenging situation to deal with the huge number of patients. We, in the Ministry of Health, are lacking essential medicine, medical supply, equipment needed to manage. And also we don’t have any. In this hospital we have more than 550 already placed in the departments. They are full. And I would like to show you how the corridors also are filled by the displaced people. We can go upstairs.