Physician saw horror in Gaza
Hospital volunteer shocked by suffering, lack of supplies
Dr. Ahmad Yousaf said nothing could have prepared him for what he saw as a volunteer at one of the few remaining functioning hospitals left in the Gaza Strip.
Yousaf witnessed people lying on the floor in puddles of their own blood and patients with 60 to 70% of their skin severely burned, all whom were waiting for the little care available in a packed hospital inside a war zone.
After returning from Gaza on Thursday, Yousaf, a 38-year-old board-certified internist and pediatrician who lives in Little Rock and who has made other humanitarian expeditions to care for refugees in Jordan, Colombia and Bangladesh, said nothing compares to his roughly onemonth stay in Gaza.
“I was not mentally or emotionally prepared for the number of kids that died in my hands, for the amount of traumatic amputations that I saw, brain trauma, in mass, every single day, every few hours.”
Gaza is a 141-square-mile strip of land on the Mediterranean Sea bordered by Egypt and Israel and with a population of approximately 2.1 million people. Hamas, which is considered a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) by the U.S. State Department, has controlled Gaza since 2007.
The latest hostilities in Gaza began when Hamas launched an attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7 that left about 1,200 people dead, according to the United Nations, which cited Israeli authorities. Militants also took 251 people hostage, with 116 still in Gaza, according to Human Rights Watch. In May, the United Nations, citing the Ministry of Health in Gaza, estimated the death toll in Gaza since Oct. 7 was more than 38,000.
Yousaf decided to travel to Gaza after watching reports of the war on TikTok, Ins
tagram and Telegram, then volunteered with MedGlobal Healthcare, an international, medical nongovernmental organization that he had previously worked with on his other humanitarian trips abroad.
In Gaza, Yousaf worked at Shuhada al-Aqsa Hospital, located in the central part of the Gaza Strip in the city of Deir al-Balah. Central Gaza is one of the few places considered a relative safe zone in the densely populated strip that is now mostly a war zone. Given that most of the Gaza Strip has been destroyed, the hospitals in central Gaza are one of the few places where people can receive medical treatment.
“So, what would happen was we’d hear or feel an explosion in the distance, and we knew about a half-hour to an hour and a half after, we’d get an influx of patients,” Yousaf said. “Sometimes brought in by donkey carts, sometimes brought in by ambulance — with multiple people per ambulance — sometimes brought in the back of a car with family panicking, bringing their family in pieces into the ER at various stages of death and dying.”
With large numbers of patients coming into the hospitals, doctors had only seconds to assess who could be saved and who could not.
Yousaf said burns were often the worst from a medical perspective, as medical workers with few supplies felt helpless to treat patients who were suffering and on the brink of death.
“And there was nothing we could do. We didn’t have enough wound care supplies.
We didn’t have enough ventilators,” Yousaf said. “There were times we’d have to make choices between intubating one 6-year-old and one 8-year-old and we’d have to pick one based on who had, what we thought, was going to be more survivable injuries.”
Dr. John Kahler, co-founder of MedGlobal Health, said of Gaza, “It’s by far the worst situation I’ve ever been in in my life.”
“I’ve been in a lot of bad places, so I thought I was prepared for this,” Kahler said.
Kahler, who is based in Chicago, said the situation in Gaza is at a level of crisis that exceeds the other humanitarian trips he has made to Syria, Yemen and Haiti. Kahler said he has made three trips to Gaza, where he worked out of MedGlobal’s Primary Health Center.
After the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, Kahler said, international aid flowed into the country. In Aleppo, which received some of the most intense fighting of the Syrian civil war, civilians were able to flee, Kahler said.
“So Aleppo, you could get out. Well, you can’t get out of here,” Kahler said of Gaza. “This is like a theater of the catastrophe. You just can’t get out. And now people can’t get in to help either.”
In Gaza, often patients with severe injuries who would normally receive in- tensive care elsewhere are not able to receive such treatment. Kahler said when he visited Nasser Hospital, located in Khan Yunis in the Gaza Strip, he saw the extreme rationing of care.
According to Kahler, a child in Gaza with burns covering more than 60% of his body may receive little to no care, meaning he would likely die within hours.
“In (Nasser) Hospital, that kid is left to see how he goes, and there’s a very good chance he will die within the next few hours because of loss of fluids and things like that,” Kahler said. “Because you only have a limited amount of fluids you can use and also a limited amount of anesthesia.”
Both Kahler and Yousaf said there is a lack of medical supplies in Gaza, and it has become more difficult to bring in medical equipment since Israel launched launched its offensive into Rafah in May.
Rafah, located on the Gaza-Egypt border, has been a key crossing point for humanitarian aid, but since an escalation in war in that location, Yousaf said he and other aid workers had to cross into Gaza through Kerem Shalom, located on the Israel border, where Israeli officials have tight limits on what can be brought in, and which has slowed the delivery of humanitarian aid into Gaza, according to Doctors Without Borders.
“There’s zero access to medical supplies in Gaza right now,” Yousaf said. “We’d reuse things that you’d never reuse in a normal situation because of the lack of supplies available.”
Yousaf said medical workers in Gaza had to ration gloves, not change gloves between patients or use their bare hands. Doctors also don’t have access to wet gauze to treat burns. The hospital had limited access to electricity and clean water, Yousaf said.
According to the United Nations, there are 1,500 hospital beds available in Gaza, down from the pre-war number of 3,500. The lack of medical supplies has also led to “unnecessary deaths, infected wounds and unnecessary amputations,” according to Dr. Hanan Balkhy, regional director of the Mediterranean for the World Health Organization.
“There’s no autoclaves, right, because the energy is gone, so sanitizing, sterilizing supplies is a luxury they did not have,” Yousaf said.
Back in the safety of Arkansas, Yousaf said it’s hard not to be reminded of his experience in Gaza. He compared the sounds of the constant bombardments in Gaza to the sounds of a rolling thunderstorm in the distance. The noise of his neighbor’s lawnmower, for instance, reminded him of the buzzing of Israeli drones that fly over the Gaza Strip.
Yousaf, who moved from New Jersey to Arkansas eight years ago, said when it came to volunteering in Gaza, “Somebody has to go.”
“We’ve been blessed in 2024 to live in, you know, a wonderful country with safety and security for the most part, and good lives,” Yousaf said. “And if we don’t pay it forward or pay it back or whatever, I think it’s kind of a travesty by itself.”
“There’s zero access to medical supplies in Gaza right now. We’d reuse things that you’d never reuse in a normal situation because of the lack of supplies available.” — Dr. Ahmad Yousaf