Arriving at the end of October, Paul Ley testifies to the very complicated working conditions in which hospitals operate, regularly shaken by Hamas rocket fire and Israeli bombings.
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In the Gaza Strip, where only one hospital operates in the northern sector, international doctors have entered the city to try to support their Palestinian colleagues who are overwhelmed by the number of victims. Near Khan Younès in the south, a team from the International Committee of the Red Cross, the ICRC, set up a structure. But the conditions of intervention are terribly fragile.
Paul Ley is a veteran of war medicine. For the ICRC, he has already worked in Afghanistan, Uganda and Sierra Leone. He arrived at the end of October 2023 in the European hospital in Gaza, a structure which suffers both from the influx of wounded and the lack of fuel for electricity. “We work without a net, very close to coming to a complete stop”he confides.
“There are explosions all the time”
The hospital operates using fuel oil reserves and solar panels. The reception capacities had to be tripled, according to the surgeon. The injured are now arriving from closing hospitals, and the cases are mostly serious. “They are all patients who were victims of explosions. I have not yet seen anyone injured by bullets, for example. They are very complex patients to treat. The very first patient I had was a kid from a year, who had lost both his legs.”
Cases that are all the more complex to treat because the hospital is not in a safe area. Moreover, during Paul Ley’s interview with franceinfo, several rockets were fired a few hundred meters from the hospital. “You could say that here it’s a war zone and in the north it’s a death zone. There are explosions all the time.” Since the start of the war, more than 27,000 people have been injured in Gaza, according to figures from the Hamas health ministry.