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Shortages Put Gaza's Hospitals on the Brink of Collapse
• Three operations-a-time in overstretched theatres • Call for Israel to let in most serious cases for treatment
JERUSALEM and GAZA CITY - Emergency medical supplies were being flown to the Middle East yesterday to help Gaza's overstretched hospitals, where doctors say they are still struggling to cope with hundreds of injured patients.
An injured boy is treated at the Shifa hospital in Gaza City. (Photograph: Khalil Hamra/AP) Doctors at the Shifa hospital, a 585-bed complex which is the largest in Gaza, said they had treated patients on the floor and conducted operations with as many as three different patients and a dozen doctors crowded into each operating theater.
All 25 intensive care beds were full, said Dr Hussain Ashaur, the hospital director, and there were still another 87 patients in a critical condition waiting to enter intensive care.
He said there were severe shortages of medical supplies, including gauze, sterilization fluids and anesthetics. In total 135 types of medical supplies were needed and 94 separate medicines. Sheets and cloth for intensive care beds were in such short supply that they were being washed three times a day.
Doctors said they were overwhelmed on Saturday, with the first rush of large numbers of injured patients, although pressure had eased slightly on Monday and yesterday. Still, the hospital was in a fragile state, Ashaur said. "We're close to collapsing if this situation continues. We have shortages of everything," he said.
The hospital was running on generators yesterday after a break in the electricity supply, and already one of its three generators had broken down and could not be repaired because of a lack of spare parts.
The International Committee of the Red Cross was to fly in 11 tonnes of supplies to Tel Aviv, which it hoped would then be allowed into Gaza. A Red Cross surgical team is on standby to fly in as well, as soon as it receives permission from the Israeli authorities.
The World Health Organization is to fly 50 surgical kits from Norway to Israel, with enough supplies to treat 5,000 wounded people. Another nine basic health kits, enough for three months' treatment of 90,000 people with common illnesses, is also to be sent.
However, for several months Israel has allowed only limited supplies of humanitarian goods into Gaza and no other imports or exports. That has left Gaza's health system in a state of crisis, according to Physicians for Human Rights, an Israeli group.
It said even before Israel's latest bombing campaign began on Saturday that the Gazan health system was "operating under severe shortages and limitations". As well as shortages of medical equipment and trained personnel, there were shortages of medicine and a broader lack of knowledge and training in dealing with complex diseases and injuries.
Israel allowed around 100 trucks of humanitarian supplies into Gaza yesterday, a much higher number than usual but still a long way below the numbers passing through before the economic blockade was imposed last year.
Physicians for Human Rights said it knew of six patients in intensive care at the Shifa hospital who needed treatment outside Gaza but were too weak to travel the seven hours by road to Cairo.
The group said hospitals in Israel, as in the past, were ready to take the patients but the only crossing they would use out of Gaza, at Erez, had been closed since Friday. The group, together with other Israeli human rights groups, sent a letter to the Israeli defense ministry asking that patients be allowed out.
In the Shifa hospital yesterday doctors described working 20-hour days just to keep up with the flood of patients. "We thought we were in a critical situation in the past, but when we saw this we realised what had gone before was nothing," said Dr Nabil Shawa, head of orthopedics.
"We're not prepared for this number of casualties. There were so many people I couldn't move freely from one room to the next. Besides, I have my family, and my children were at school and I was trying to reach them to know that they were safe. You can just imagine the effort, the worry. We're exhausted."
Oxfam called for an immediate ceasefire to allow in sufficient humanitarian supplies. "What is needed is an immediate ceasefire to end the terrible levels of human suffering in Gaza," said Jeremy Hobbs, director of Oxfam International.
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17 Comments so far
Show AllIs there anything we can DO?? If I knew of a way to go over there and help I would. Any ideas??
you could try this:
http://www.msf.org
How many more times do we need to read this kind of news about Israel's lack of respect for human lives.
From the day the country became independent, from the massacres of Deir-e Yasin, to Sabra and Shatila, the order by the Nobel peace prize winner to break the arms and legs of Palestinian children during the first intifada, to Jenin and now Gaza.
How long are we going to accept this apartheid style colonial regime using the Holocaust of the Jews in Europe as an excuse for it's criminal behavior?
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/12/28/114432/83/489/677860
"Today I end my support of Israel"
ENOUGH. I'm done justifying crimes against humanity by a country that claims to be an illuminated western democracy. I'm done defending a country that is unwilling to grant self-determination to a neighboring people because it won't let go of a few settlements and divide a city. I'm done tolerating the slaughtering of innocent kids, the murderous and barbaric occupation of an impoverished people, the utter disregard for human life.
Fuck them.
If they think their daily peace of mind is worth the lives of hundreds of innocent people, Fuck them.
If they think the best way to go right now would be to vote for Natanyahu (who is so far winning in the polls), Fuck them.
If they won't bat an eye before keeping millions without electricity or water, before bombing civilian neighborhoods at exactly the time when kids are leaving schools, before breaking every standard of international law or moral decency, Fuck them.
It's time for every true progressive in this country and around the world to do the only thing that our consciences should allow us to do, the only thing that can keep us consistent with our supposed beliefs that human life is precious and that unnecessary violence is always criminal, barbarous and unacceptable. We must demand that Israel stop violence and immediately put an end to its colonialist military occupation of Palestine.
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Farhad Abdolian Antibes-France Home page http://www.abdolian.com/thoughts
"Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it" Albert Einstein
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thank you for your wonderful website farhad...................
Hi coco,
You are welcome, it is like a reference for me to keep track of information I want to keep track of, nothing special. I am glad you liked it.
Cheers,
/Farhad
It warms my heart to know that Jews of goodwill are standing up against Israel's Nazi like policies.
Aid organizations are asking for a cease fire to get food and medical supplies into Gaza. Right now there is only a trickle. It is not so much that the Red Cross doesn't have the supplies as it is that they can't get them into Gaza.
Food, medicine, fuel needed in Gaza, agencies warn
http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2008/12/31/gaza-humanitarian.html
QUOTE: Gunness said emergency wards are collapsing under the volume of patients. / "If you have a foot blown off and it's not life-threatening, then you probably won't be seen. If what you have is life-threatening, then with luck, you will be," he said.
Yep,
You know this didn't start without the green light from Washington.
Katrina just wasn't enough for him. The AWOL chimp had to pull one more war crime out of his hat before slinks out the door.
You're a mean one, Mr. Bush.
You really are a heel.
You're as cuddly as a cactus,
You're as charming as an eel.
Mr. Bush.
You're a bad banana
With a greasy black peel.
You're a monster, Mr. Bush.
Your heart's an empty hole.
Your brain is full of spiders,
You've got garlic in your soul.
Mr. Bush.
I wouldn't touch you, with a
thirty-nine-and-a-half foot pole.
You're a vile one, Mr. Bush.
You have termites in your smile.
You have all the tender sweetness
Of a seasick crocodile.
Mr. Bush.
Given the choice between the two of you
I'd take the seasick crocodile.
You're a foul one, Mr. Bush.
You're a nasty, wasty skunk.
Your heart is full of unwashed socks
Your soul is full of gunk.
Mr. Bush.
The three words that best describe you,
are, and I quote: "Stink. Stank. Stunk."
You're a rotter, Mr. Bush.
You're the king of sinful sots.
Your heart's a dead tomato splot
With moldy purple spots,
Mr. Bush.
Your soul is an apalling dump heap overflowing
with the most disgraceful assortment of deplorable
rubbish imaginable,
Mangled up in tangled up knots.
You nauseate me, Mr. Bush.
With a nauseaus super-naus.
You're a crooked jerky jockey
And you drive a crooked horse.
Mr. Bush.
You're a three decker saurkraut and toadstool
sandwich
With arsenic sauce.
(With apologies to the good doctor S.)
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We have heard the Palestinian side of the story, but we need to hear the other side of the story, don't we?
http://palestinian.ning.com/forum/topics/the-other-side-of-the-story
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If you don't mind, I suggest you start discussing about the equal if not worse plight of the Palestinians in Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. Furthermore, the EU is no less racist than the US.
Terrance Mitchell
Redfield, South Dakota
and add to that their plight in the whole of the gulf arab states.............
Ok, which ones? I'd like to research on those too so that next time I can include those names and help spread the word. Thanks.
Terrance Mitchell
Redfield, South Dakota
Israelis have no heart and no conscience --- sociopaths, psychopaths, killers of children and their mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, people who have never harmed them. Dogs are treated better than that. Those fireworks that are sent to the Israelis that they're so afraid of most likely are sent by young boys, boys who throw rocks at Israeli tanks and then get machine-gunned down for it.
Very interesting article to read:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/dec/29/gaza-hamas-israel/print
Once again, the Israelis bomb the starving and imprisoned population of
Gaza. The world watches the plight of 1.5 million Gazans live on TV and
online; the western media largely justify the Israeli action. Even some
Arab outlets try to equate the Palestinian resistance with the might of
the Israeli military machine.
An American journal once asked me to contribute an essay to a discussion
on whether terrorism or attacks against civilians could ever be justified.
My answer was that an American journal should not be asking whether
attacks on civilians can ever be justified. This is a question for the
weak, for the Native Americans in the past, for the Jews in Nazi Germany,
for the Palestinians today, to ask themselves.
Terrorism is a normative term and not a descriptive concept. An empty word
that means everything and nothing, it is used to describe what the Other
does, not what we do. The powerful – whether Israel, America, Russia or
China – will always describe their victims' struggle as terrorism, but the
destruction of Chechnya, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the slow
slaughter of the remaining Palestinians, the American occupation of Iraq
and Afghanistan – with the tens of thousands of civilians it has killed …
these will never earn the title of terrorism, though civilians were the
target and terrorising them was the purpose.
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Farhad Abdolian Antibes-France Home page http://www.abdolian.com/thoughts
"Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it" Albert Einstein
----------------
our leading Israeli rabbis have sanctioned the murder of civilian population in the Gaza Strip amid the Israeli onslaught on the region.
"When a population living near a Jewish town sends bombs at the Jewish town with the purpose of killing and destroying Jewish lives there, it is permitted, according to Jewish Law, to fire shells and bombs at the firing sites, even if they are populated by civilians," read a ruling issued by Rabbi Yaakov Yosef, Rabbi Dov Lior, Rabbi Shalom Dov Wolpe and Rabbi Meir Mazuz.
The four added that a warning should be issued prior to any attacks; however, they reiterated that the army's response to rocket or mortar fires may be immediate "even if there is no time for a warning."
The rabbis argued that the army should announce that it would bomb any civilian community from which a rocket is fired to force the local residents into confronting those who fire rockets or mortars at Israeli targets.
Rabbi Mazuz is a member of the Shas Council of Torah Sages.
The ruling seems to give a free hand to Israeli commanders to attack Gaza's civilian population and persuade those troops who have reservations to kill civilians due to humanitarian considerations.
Tel Aviv launched an "all-out war" against the enclave allegedly to put an end to rocket attacks by Palestinian factions on Israel. IAF warplanes and helicopters have so far pounded over 300 targets, including schools and TV stations across the coastal area since Saturday.
The attacks have left at least 385 people killed and 1,800 others wounded, Palestinian medical sources told Press TV.
According to UN officials, 57 civilians, including women and children, are among the victims.
Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, however, had formerly downplayed the high number of civilian deaths saying civilian casualties are a quite normal outcome of war.
SB/DA
may there be an end to all suffering
We treat our dogs better than the Palestinians.
There is no humanity in our leaders, only punishment for those that do not toe the line.
Latest numbers 412 Palestinians dead, 4 Israelites dead - 416 too many deaths.