No meals, fainting nurses, dwindling baby formula: Starvation haunts Gaza hospitals
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Experts and doctors say starvation is now sweeping across Gaza amid restrictions on aid imposed by Israel for months.
PHOTO: AFP
Patrick Kingsley, Bilal Shbair and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad
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JERUSALEM - In several of the hospitals still functioning in the Gaza Strip, nurses are fainting from hunger and dehydration. Managers often cannot provide meals for patients or medical staff. Doctors are running low on formula for newborns, in some cases giving them water alone.
And at least three major hospitals lack the nutritional fluids needed to properly treat malnourished children and adults
Those scenes were described in interviews starting on July 25 with seven doctors – four from Gaza, and three volunteers from Australia, Britain and the United States. All of them worked this past week in four of the territory’s main hospitals.
After months of warnings, international agencies, experts and doctors say starvation is now sweeping across Gaza amid restrictions on aid imposed by Israel for months.
At least 56 Palestinians died in July of starvation in the territory, nearly half of the total of such deaths since the war began 22 months ago, according to data released on July 26 by the Gaza Health Ministry.
As starvation rises, medical institutions and staff, already struggling to treat war wounds and illness, are now grappling with rising cases of malnourishment.
In all four hospitals, the doctors described how they are increasingly unable to save malnourished babies and are instead forced to simply manage their decline.
The babies are too weak to be flooded with nutrients, which could overload their system and cause them to suffer “refeeding syndrome”, which could kill them.
In some cases, the fluids that the doctors can safely give to the babies are not enough to prevent them from dying.
Asked for comment, Cogat, the Israeli military department that oversees aid to Gaza, said it “continues to work in coordination with international actors to allow and facilitate the continued entry of humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip, in accordance with international law”.
Late on the night of July 26, the Israeli military began to drop airborne aid over northern Gaza, and said it would pause its military activity for several hours a day in key areas to make it easier to deliver aid by land.
One-third of Palestinians in Gaza are forced to go without food for days in a row, the World Food Programme said recently.
Of the young children and pregnant women treated at clinics run by Doctors Without Borders in Gaza, roughly one-fourth are suffering from malnutrition, the medical aid group said last week. NYTIMES
