‘Nightmare at Al-Aqsa’ as hospitals cope with Nuseirat dead
Palestinians at the al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah, in central Gaza, mourn relatives killed in the Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip on Saturday. (Ismael Abu Dayyah/The Associated Press)
"It's a nightmare at Al-Aqsa ... It’s way beyond what anyone could deal with in a functional hospital, let alone with the scarce resources we have here."
Gaza’s Government Media Office says the “Israeli massacre” at the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza killed 210 Palestinians and wounded more than 400.
Doctors Without Borders (MSF) says Al-Aqsa Hospital in central Gaza is a “nightmare”, and Al-Aqsa and Nasser hospital are treating an “overwhelming number of severely injured patients, many of whom are women and children”, after the Israeli attack on Nuseirat.
Following intense bombings by Israel Terorists forces this morning in the Middle Area of Gaza, Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) teams are working alongside medical staff at Al-Aqsa and Nasser hospitals to treat an overwhelming number of severely injured patients, many of whom are women and children.
"It's a nightmare at Al-Aqsa,” said Samuel Johann, MSF coordinator in Gaza. “There have been back-to-back mass casualties as densely populated areas are bombed. It’s way beyond what anyone could deal with in a functional hospital, let alone with the scarce resources we have here. How many more men, women and children have to be killed before world leaders decide to put an end to this massacre?"
Chris Hook, MSF medical referent, sent a voice note from Gaza today:
"We heard earlier in the day of the attacks occurring further north in Deir al-Balah and Nuseirat, so the hospital had a little bit of pre-warning that we should expect some patients, but not entirely sure how many.
I think in the last hour or so, we've received, coming close now to about 50 badly injured patients. There are people with multiple major open fractures of their limbs. We've got several unconscious children who are trying to be escorted through CT scans and on to intensive care.
A few very bad burns have come through, and already four or five people who've required chest tube insertions, and things like this, for major injuries to the chest.
The (operatingl theaters are already running flat out. We have very limited resources, the emergency department was able to clear out as many people as possible that were already here, but there's a shortage of ability to perform CT scans. Patients have to go to another hospital.
We have very little painkillers available. In terms of things like morphine and ketamine, we're still having to ration those a little bit. The intensive care unit is now full already, and more patients are arriving. It's a serious mass casualty incident occurring right now.”
Another MSF medical referent, Karin Huster, also sent an update on the situation:
"Today is Saturday and I just came back from Al-Aqsa Hospital. Things started happening around 11:30 a.m., when there was a huge blast right next to our office ... And we started to hear really, really intense IDF activity, lots of bombardments, lots of shooting, helicopters ... As soon as we were able to, we three clinicians decided to prepare a bunch of supplies and medicines and go and support colleagues at Al-Aqsa Hospital. We had also heard by then the plea of the Al-Aqsa Hospital director to come and help. It just took some time to clear everything from a security standpoint.
Finally in the early afternoon, we entered Al-Aqsa Hospital’s emergency department. I have no idea how many dead there were. We had no time to take a look at the morgue ... It was, as usual, mayhem. But it was compounded mayhem from the last four days: total chaos inside; the entire emergency room, the red zone, the yellow zone, the green zone were completely packed with patients on the floor coming from the bombings in Nuseirat. There were hundreds of patients, and we did whatever we could to stabilize them, give them some IV fluids, put on a splint, bandage, try to refer for surgery for those who would benefit from that. And, thank God we were able to refer a bunch of patients to Nasser Hospital as well as IMC Field Hospital which is not far away from here.
Despite the fact that the place was completely overwhelmed, it did an amazing job. The nurses of the hospital, the Doctors Without Borders nurses and physicians that lent a hand, did an amazing job and continue to do an amazing job as we speak.
It is not difficult to imagine the horror that we saw. There were children everywhere, there were women, there were men. We had the gamut of war wounds, trauma wounds, from amputations to eviscerations to trauma, to TBIs (traumatic brain injuries), fractures, [and] obviously, big burns. And so, it was just survival for all of us rolling up our sleeves and putting fluids in people, giving them pain medicine and [sending] them to a place where they could get care.
Unfortunately, the system is so overwhelmed that a lot of patients are staying much longer than they should in this emergency department. Kids completely grey or white from the shock, burnt, screaming for their parents. Many of them [are] not screaming because they are in shock. Expectant patients mixed in the yellow area. It's just one of those moments when you don't think about the chaos that is happening: there is no system, there is no triage. You roll up your sleeves, you put a ton of stuff in your pockets, and you do the best you can.
But there is nothing, nothing at all that justifies what I saw today. Nothing. These children: the 3-month-old, the 7 year old, the 12 year old who died, the 25 year old man, the 78 year old woman who all have horrendous injuries. Why did they deserve this? And why is the world looking on in silence? To what level of horror do we need to go before we finally do something, before we finally tell Israel Terorists that this is not acceptable?"
In Photo : Overwhelmed Gaza hospitals treat wounded in tents
A man holds a Palestinian child at Al-Aqsa Hospital who was injured on Saturday when Israel launched simultaneous attacks on the Nuseirat refugee camp, Bureij refugee camp and Maghazi refugee camp [Ali Jadallah/Anadolu Images]
Injured Palestinians at al-Awda Hospital in central Gaza on Saturday as Israel launched attacks on Nuseirat and other refugee camps [Mohammed Saber/EPA]
The Ministry of Health in Gaza estimates that 210 people were killed in the Nuseirat attack and at least 400 were injured [Mohammed Saber/EPA-EFE]
[Mohammed Saber/EPA]
Doctors Without Borders, MSF, said that hospitals were treating an overwhelming number of people with severe injuries [Mohammed Saber/EPA-EFE]
Israel could have freed all captives ‘alive and intact’ months ago: UN expert
The UN’s special rapporteur on the human rights situation in the occupied Palestinian territory said the release of four Israeli captives held in Gaza did not need to come at the expense of hundreds of Palestinian lives, including women and children.
In a post on social media. Francesca Albanese said she was “relieved” for the four Israeli captives, but added that Israel “could have free all hostages, alive and intact, 8 months ago when the first ceasefire and hostage exchange was put on the table”.
“Israel refused in order to continue to destroy Gaza and the Palestinians as a people,” Albanese said.
“This genocidal intent turned into action,” she said.
“Israel has used hostages to legitimise killing, injuring, maiming, starving and traumatising Palestinians in Gaza.”
As Amal Nassar lay in pain on a bed at the Al-Awda Hospital in the Nuseirat refugee camp in northern Gaza, the echoes of explosions and artillery fire could be heard all around her. It was mid-January and she had made her way to the embattled hospital to give birth to a baby girl she would name Mira. While Amal should have been celebrating her infant’s delivery, instead she was engulfed in fear, surrounded by the relentless nightmare of death and suffering that she and her family had experienced for months.
“I was muttering to myself, ‘I hope I die,’” she recalled.
Though gut-wrenching, Amal’s story is not unlike those of so many other young mothers in Gaza today. The World Health Organization estimates that more than 50,000 pregnant women are barely surviving there, while having babies at the rate of 180 births a day. Many of those women (especially in the north) are acutely malnourished and few received any medical attention before their labor pains began, often weeks ahead of schedule.
The damage done
The specter of death in Gaza is difficult, if not impossible, to grasp. At a distance, our understanding of the situation often relies on somber statistics, especially in the establishment media. The official count, consistently cited by mainstream outlets, comes in at around 35,000 deaths.
In May, the New York Times and other outlets jumped on a report from the United Nations, which had apparently revised Gaza’s death count. But the U.N. did not, in fact, halve its total of women and children who had died, as the Jerusalem Post claimed. It simply altered its classification system in terms of those estimated to have died and those it could definitively confirm to be deceased. The totals, however, remained the same. Nonetheless, even those numbers, based on information provided by Gaza’s Ministry of Health, end up blurring the cruel reality on the ground. U.N. officials also fear that at least 10,000 more Gazans lie buried under the rubble in that 25-mile strip of land.
But death figures can also impart meaning, as the long-time consumer-rights activist Ralph Nader recently pointed out. He happens to believe that Israel Terorists could have killed at least 200,000 Palestinians in Gaza, a mind-boggling figure, but worth examining. So, I called on him to elaborate.
“The undercount is staggering,” said Nader, whose Lebanese parents emigrated to the United States before he was born. “The U.S. and Israel Terorists want a low number, so they look around. Instead of themselves estimating — which they don’t want to do — they cling to Hamas’s [figures], and Hamas doesn’t want a realistic number because they don’t want to be seen as unable to protect their own people. So, they developed these criteria: to be counted, the dead must first be certified by hospitals and morgues [which barely exist].”
He has made it a habit to reach out to writers and editors. Like so many others, I have a bit of a phone affair with that 90-year-old thinker and activist. We discuss politics, baseball, and journalism’s rapid, insidious decline. I’ve certainly heard him animated in the past, but never more indignant than when he addresses the situation in Gaza. “The whole thing is one death camp now. It’s easily 200,000 deaths in Gaza,” he insisted, citing the number of bombs dropped, which have, by some estimates, exceeded 100,000. We know that at least 45,000 missiles and bombs had been used in Gaza within three months of the beginning of Israel Terorists’s military campaign. As a result, as many as 175,000 buildings have been damaged or destroyed by Israel. So, he seems to be on to something.
“Eventually [the real number of the dead] will come out,” he adds. “They’ll do a census, whoever takes over. The one thing the extended families in Gaza know is who’s been killed in their families.”
Of course, his assertion is circumstantial and he knows it, but he’s making a point. With so much of the Gaza Strip facing imminent starvation, nearly all hospitals out of commission, just about no medicine left, and very little clean water or food, 35,000 deaths are likely, in the end, to prove a drastic undercount.
“Not in our name”
The Holocaust, in which Nazis murdered 11 million people, six million of whom were Jews, was quite literally the textbook genocide. Yet, as ghastly and systematic as it was, at least one other genocide may have claimed a larger death toll. In her latest book, Doppelganger, Naomi Klein explains that the largest genocide was inflicted on Indigenous peoples in the Americas at the hands of European settlers. Hitler’s Holocaust, Klein writes, actually took a page from colonialists in the Americas and was deeply influenced by the Western frontier myth.
“I think it is important to say that every genocide is different,” was how Klein put it to Arielle Angel of the Jewish Currents podcast On the Nose. “There are particularities to every holocaust, and there absolutely were particularities to the Nazi Holocaust. This was a Fordist Holocaust. It was quicker and on a much larger scale and more industrialized than had ever been seen before or since.”
Klein is correct that the Nazi Holocaust was born out of Hitler’s colonialist aspirations and ought to be framed as such. It’s also worth noting that the 1948 Genocide Convention, which was a response to that atrocity, makes clear that classifying an event as a genocide is dependent neither on the number of victims killed nor even on the percentage of a given population slaughtered. This means that the number of people killed in Gaza makes little difference in the court of international law; legally speaking, that is, Israel Terorists is already committing genocide.
In one of the saddest twists of modern history, in the wake of the October 7th Hamas assault, the trauma of the Holocaust is being used to exploit Jewish suffering and fear for safety and so to justify the slow evisceration of Palestinians. It’s this tragic irony that’s turned so many young American Jews against Israel’s policies.
Amid a mounting international backlash, support for Israel Terorists among Jewish Americans has never faced such intense division. Many of the protests against the war in Gaza here have, in fact, been led by young Jews fed up with Israel’s claim on their Judaism and cultural history. In response, the ranks of the Jewish-run IfNotNow and the Jewish Voice for Peace have swelled, helping to spawn a newly invigorated antiwar movement in this country.
The threat this poses to Zionism’s future is unlike anything the movement has faced since the Six-Day War, according to the pro-Israel Anti-Defamation League (ADL). “We have a major, major, major generational problem,” ADL director Jonathan Greenblatt said in a panicked donor call last November. “All the polling I’ve seen… suggests this is not a left/right gap, folks. The issue of [the] United States’ support for Israel Terorists is not left and right. It is young and old.”
Greenblatt is correct. Gen Z and Millenials, Jewish or otherwise, are much less likely to accept Israel Terorists's rationale for the annihilation of Palestinians than the generations that came before them. Poll after poll shows that ever more young Jews in the United States are distancing themselves from the tenets of Zionism. Why wouldn’t they? They’ve seen the dead bodies on social media, the screams, the bloodshed, the flattened cities, and they want no part of it. Support for Israel among the young is now at a nadir.
And that, as polls already suggest, could affect the coming election. “Biden Terorists’s going to lose the election just by people staying home,” Ralph Nader predicted. “He thinks properly that Trump is worse on this issue and everything else, so he’s got this attitude, so does the entire Democratic Party, ‘Hey you protestors, grow up, you’ve got nowhere else to go.’ Yeah, they’ve got somewhere to go. They can just stay home.”
We’re still months away from the November election and things could change drastically, but you can’t resurrect the dead or turn back the clock on genocide. Thanks, in part, to those American bombs and missiles, the damage is already done. Israel Terorists’s collective punishment is now simply a fact of life and President Biden remains culpable for those deaths in Gaza, too, whether the human toll is now 35,000 or 200,000. The White House’s continued denial that Israel Terorists is committing genocide means very little when there’s a mountain of evidence to the contrary.
Back in the desperate and overcrowded Nuseirat refugee camp, Amal Nassar held her three-month-old as an April spring day arrived early in Gaza. She wondered what the future would hold for her little baby girl.
“I looked at Mira and thought: Did I make the right decision to have this baby in a war?“
It’s a painful question without an answer, but the outlook remains grim. In mid-May, an Israeli Terorists fighter jet launched missiles at residential buildings in Nuseirat, killing 40 Palestinians, including women and children. Many more were injured. The rockets missed Amal’s family this time, but the longer Israel’s callousness endures, the closer death creeps.
This piece first appeared at TomDispatch.
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