[Peace-discuss] AFP: Fear grips Israel-hit Gaza hospital

Wed Jul 16 11:55:42 EDT 2014

http://news.yahoo.com/fear-grips-israel-hit-gaza-hospital-151532593.html

By Sara Hussein
35 minutes ago

SHEJAIYA (Palestinian Territories) (AFP) - At Al-Wafa rehabilitation
hospital near Gaza City, a handful of doctors and nurses hover over
paralysed patients, wondering how to protect them from more air strikes as
threatened by Israel.

The patients lie mostly inert in beds lined up in the hospital's reception,
where staff moved them after an Israeli rocket crashed into the fourth
floor.

The staff have appealed to international agencies for protection, and say
the hospital is known to the Israeli army.

But it was hit again on Tuesday night.

Shortly afterwards, the Israeli army contacted the hospital three times,
saying everyone should be evacuated by morning as the air force was
planning to intensify its air strikes.

Director Basman Alashi explained that the 14 patients in the facility, many
of them paralysed or in a coma, are in no position to be moved.

And even if they were, he said, there is no place to take them.

"There is no place safe in Gaza! If a hospital is not safe, where is?

"We cannot leave our patients, they are helpless. They cannot move, they
cannot walk, they cannot eat, they cannot even scratch their heads by
themselves," he said.

Even as he spoke, the sound of shelling rattled the hospital windows.

- 'Hospital shaking' -

More than 200 people have been killed in Gaza since the latest
confrontation between Israel and Hamas militants erupted in the early hours
of July 8.

After an Egyptian truce effort failed to get off the ground on Tuesday,
there appears to be no end in sight.

View galleryPalestinian patients are treated at the Al-Wafa
rehabilitation …
Palestinian patients are treated at the Al-Wafa rehabilitation hospital
near Gaza City on July 16, 2 …
Mercifully, said staff doctor Hassan Sarsur, many of the patients are
unconscious and unaware of what is happening.

But for others, the situation is terrifying.

"Several of our female patients are paralysed but conscious, and during the
night they were crying with fear and clutching our hands," Sarsur said.

Aya Abdeen, one of eight women in the facility, is paralysed from the waist
down because of a tumour in her spinal cord.

"Yesterday, when they said that we have to evacuate and with all the
shelling, of course I was afraid," she told AFP.

"There was shelling all around and the hospital was shaking. And I am as
you see, I can't move," she said.

"We are sick people, in a hospital!"

Karam Shublaq suffered a gunshot wound to his spinal cord in 2006 and is
also paralysed from the waist down.

He is being treated for pressure sores and is fitted with a colostomy bag.

"We wake up to shelling and we go to sleep to shelling," he said.

"We can't even move and they hit the fourth floor of the building several
times, so they moved us down here."

To care for the patients, the staff are working 24-hour shifts, battling
fatigue but also fear.

"We are human beings, of course we are scared," said Sarsur.

"We don't know what to do to protect the patients. We'd already evacuated
the fourth floor and now we've evacuated all the floors except the
reception."

Several patients have been sent back to their families, but others require
medical care that relatives can't provide.

- Watching over brother -

Sixteen-year-old Nur Okasha has been sleeping at the hospital for a week to
keep watch over his 13-year-old brother Mohammed who has been in a coma for
several months after nearly drowning.

He lies motionless on the bed, his eyes half open as Nur flicks away flies.

"We wanted to take him home, but the tube in his trachea requires a suction
machine, and we don't always have electricity at home," the teenager
explained.

He keeps vigil at Mohammed's side, putting in his eyedrops and talking to
him.

"I want to make him feel like someone is always here. I tell him that his
friends miss him. I talk to him about anything except the war," he said.

Doctors at the hospital have reached out to international agencies in a bid
to secure Israeli assurances that the facility won't be hit again.

And a group of foreign activists are staying at the hospital in the hope
that their presence might deter further attacks.

"The Israelis told the (international) agencies that the hospital was not
the target, only the area around it. But they have already hit us
directly," Sarsur said.

"We are helpless, the war comes to us and there is nothing we can do to
stop it."

===

Robert Naiman
Policy Director
Just Foreign Policy
www.justforeignpolicy.org
naiman at justforeignpolicy.org
(202) 448-2898 x1
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