(Beersheva) When Dan Schwarzfuchs, head of emergency at Soroka Hospital in Beersheva, southern Israel, heard two consecutive warning sirens early Saturday morning, he rushed to the hospital about 40 kilometers from the Gaza Strip.
“We very quickly understood that it was war,” he said in an interview with AFP.
“Very quickly, the entire hospital staff was here, over 1,000 doctors, all the nurses, everyone who was supposed to be there was present […] and even those who did not need to be there, nurses on maternity leave, doctors who came from everywhere.”
The Islamist movement Hamas, in power in the Gaza Strip, launched a deadly offensive against Israel on Saturday morning, in the middle of Shabbat and on the last day of the Sukkot holiday.
Several hundred of its armed men infiltrated localities in southern Israel, under cover of a barrage of several thousand rockets, and massacred more than a thousand Israelis, most of them civilians, according to reports. Israeli authorities.
According to the latest report from the Israeli Ministry of Health published on Wednesday, Hamas attacks and rocket fire have left more than 3,200 injured, evacuated to Israeli hospitals since Saturday, including 870 to Soroka hospital, the largest in the south. from the country.
Covered in blood
“As early as 8 a.m., the first injured began to arrive at the hospital,” relates Dan Schwarzfuchs, 60, also deputy director of the establishment.
“And from that point on we treated casualties in the trauma unit at a crazy pace that we never could have imagined would happen or that we would be able to follow him “.
The number of wounded treated in traumatology in the first 24 hours of the war – 120 – was higher than the number of wounded treated in an average “normal month”, explained the doctor, who has not left the hospital since Saturday .
“The number of injured is astronomical. During the 2014 Israeli operation in the Gaza Strip, 40 injured was a very difficult day,” he said by way of comparison.
On Saturday, “we finished treating a patient, we transferred him to the operating room or to intensive care and immediately another injured person took his place,” explains Dan Schwarzfuchs.
“The floor of the entire trauma unit room was covered in blood, we kept cleaning it.”
The nature of the injuries was also unusual. “Most of the injured had been shot, which requires a lot of blood transfusions.”
“Total shock”
Outside the trauma unit in the emergency department, arrived some young survivors of the hell of Tribe of Nova, the open-air party organized on the night of Friday to Saturday on the edge of the Gaza Strip and which turned into a nightmare at dawn on Saturday when infiltrated Hamas gunmen began to massacre its participants.
The young people who arrived from the party had very serious post-traumatic disorders, they were in a state of total shock after witnessing this indescribable massacre.
Dan Schwarzfuchs, head of emergency at Soroka Hospital
The staff of the establishment also had to respond to requests from the numerous families who came to try to find their missing loved ones.
“We tried to help them as much as we could but a large number of them returned home dejected, without having found anyone,” he said.
Also a doctor from Kibbutz Aloumim on the edge of the Gaza Strip, whose members managed to repel the infiltration of armed Hamas men on Saturday, Dan Schwarzfuchs, saw some of his friends arrive in his unit.
“It’s difficult to care for people you know well. But it’s a bit normal here, we’re a small country, everyone knows everyone,” says Dan Schwarzfuchs.
An officer in the army before becoming a doctor and a reservist as deputy brigade commander, he says he is prepared for difficult days.
“It is certain that there will still be injured but we are all ready.”