“There really is a feeling of total destruction”, Léo Cans, head of mission of Médecins sans frontières in the Palestinian Territories, was outraged on Saturday January 20 on franceinfo. He has been in the south of the Gaza Strip for several days, from where he gives his testimony on the situation.
Franceinfo: You are in the south of the Gaza Strip, where the fighting is now concentrated, particularly in the Khan Younes sector. What was your first observation?
Léo Cans: We are six or seven kilometers from the center of Khan Younès at the moment and even six to seven kilometers away, we hear very loudly the bombs falling all night long, it makes the windows shake, it makes the walls shake. When I was in Nasser hospital [à Khan Younès], five days ago, the windows of the operating room shattered while doctors were operating on a patient. There is a lot of shooting, helicopters. It doesn’t stop day and night.
Are there any buildings still standing in Gaza or is everything destroyed?
No, obviously, there are still buildings standing, but there are certain neighborhoods where the destruction is very significant. I worked in Raqqa [en Syrie] and it makes me think of it today, with a lot of destruction of buildings, cars… There is really a feeling of total destruction.
But where do people live and how?
People are completely naked. The city of Rafah [frontalière avec l’Egypte] has become a large refugee camp. There are tents everywhere in the city, on the beach, on the roads, it creates traffic jams. We can’t even move around anymore! People have very little water, very little food. We see long queues of people filling water containers…
It is extremely difficult for the population. They live in tents. It’s very cold at the moment. In Gaza at night, the temperature can drop to ten degrees, they don’t have enough blankets. So there are a lot of children who are sick. There are a lot of people coughing.
Basic hygiene is very complicated to maintain. And people are exhausted. We see it. There are a lot of people who are depressed. There is a real despair that falls on many of them, because many come from the North where they lost their homes. Every time we talk to someone, they tell us that they lost their house, that it was destroyed. Houses, for a Gazans, are like for a Frenchman, they are a lifetime, they are a lifetime of savings.
And then there is no future, there is no future. Everyone is waiting for the war to end. We always wonder when will the war end? And obviously, the situation in hospitals is catastrophic. I would even say that it is nightmarish.
There are drinking water problems. You told us that just now. And what are the health consequences? Do you fear epidemics? Thousands of cases of diarrhea, for example, have been reported.
Yes, absolutely, there is diarrhea and many cases of hepatitis, many skin diseases. The level of health of the general population is gradually declining and the population density is so high in the south, in Rafah, that diseases spread very quickly. Five days ago, I was at the Nasser hospital and I also went to the European hospital which are the last two hospitals in the south of the Gaza Strip which are in operation, the two big hospitals.
And the situation is nightmarish because there are a lot of children, a lot of women who are amputees, a lot of families who are struck by lightning. So, often, in the same room, there are several family members who are very seriously injured and always already people who are dead.
I was chatting with a little girl named Miriam at the European Hospital. Her story is very characteristic because she lost her little brother, her little sister in an airstrike. She lost her mother and her father is nowhere to be found. This little girl, Miriam, she had her right leg amputated, and next to her, there was her aunt who had a huge wound on her arm and her leg too, and couldn’t move from her bed.
We had to change Miriam’s dressing, without anesthesia, because he had no anesthesia. And this little girl of six or seven years old screamed for 30 minutes, the time to clean the wound… And in the end, it was terrible, because she called her mother, who died. These are the kinds of scenes that are repeated, one after the other, in all the hospital centers of the European Hospital, such as the Nasser Hospital.
International aid is still difficult to arrive. The spokesperson for the UN Secretary-General says that Israel is blocking the arrival of humanitarian aid shipments. Did you notice it?
Quite. This very morning, we had a movement to go to Gaza City, to al-Shifa hospital, to bring medicine and to see our teams who are there. And we were still blocked at the Gaza City checkpoint. This is systematic in the Israeli army. The Israeli government is preventing humanitarian aid from arriving in northern Gaza. This is unacceptable.
We have big problems bringing in equipment, for example, we cannot bring in generators. So our teams who are there, who are working very, very difficult hours, for two weeks, have no electricity, shower with cold water, we have no electricity at night, it’s is a small solar panel that gives us something to recharge the batteries. And this is how an NGO is forced to work because the Israeli government refuses to let us import generators.
And it’s the same problem for medical equipment. It is impossible to bring it to the north of Gaza, where the needs are enormous. This is a population that is totally cut off from the world and it is totally prohibited by international law. Essential goods must be able to reach people. There is no reason why we cannot bring medicine, water or food to these populations who are completely besieged in the North.