GAZA: Surgeons decry amputations, badly burned bomb victims and lack of medicine
Gaza
Doctors are a very special category of people. Doctors who opt to work in war zones are an entirely different level of special.
They take their skills and medical experience into the most dangerous of environments, knowing they risk their own lives in their mission to save others. Yet they do this regardless.
The British doctors who we came to know and immensely respect at the centre of our report, Gaza: Doctors on the Frontline, don’t see themselves as heroes or even remarkable for what they’ve done over the past few weeks in Gaza.
That, of course, is what makes them even more remarkable.
“This shouldn’t be about us,” Dr Tom Potokar scolded us more than once.
“This should be about what’s happening to the Palestinians and health workers inside Gaza.”
But like it or not, the daily video blogs the travelling doctors did about their experiences on the ground in Gaza resonated with viewers.
They sent us searing accounts of their daily lives while in Gaza. They told us of having to stitch together mostly young broken bodies, torn apart by repeated Israeli bombs.
They talked of having to perform amputations on the young, of trying to stem the pain and infections on badly burned bomb victims and of the lack of common medicines.
They fumed at what they saw as political ‘complicity’ from the international community for not doing enough to end the war. They begged for aid to be allowed in.
They spoke from the heart as humanitarians and doctors but also witnesses – and we saw them tired, frustrated, angry at times, maybe a little anxious, certainly emotional.
And yet, all the time they realised how they were just visitors in Gaza while their patients, their medical co-workers and their colleagues’ families were all living this permanently, with no escape while just trying to survive. Many do not.
“What do you say to a seven-year-old who’s lost both her legs,” Dr Tom says in one heart-wrenching vlog.
“Most of my patients are children,” Dr Victoria Rose tells us in another. We see her fall in love with a badly burned toddler, so swathed in bandages, only his face was uncovered.
“This is my favourite little guy,” she says in her vlog about three-year-old Haitum, “he has 35% burns”.
“That’s a lot for a little guy,” she goes on. And the tens of thousands who watched her updates on social media platforms fell in love with the little boy too.
Viewers see how Haitum was far from an exceptional case too. “My first three patients today were under 12,” we learn from Dr Victoria in another post.
