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The
Jabalia neighborhood of northern Gaza, where Doctors Without Borders
set up a clinic, was heavily damaged by Israeli air strikes.Photograph by Mahmoud Issa / Reuters |
On a hazy morning in November, a group of aid workers with Médecins Sans Frontières (M.S.F.), known in English as Doctors Without Borders, crossed into Gaza for a two-month mission. Jennifer Hulse, an emergency physician from the U.K., led a medical team. “We all had as many bags as we could physically carry,” Hulse said. Inside were essential supplies such as surgical tools and engine oil for generators. Her assignment was to help the Gaza Health Ministry restore access to health care in the north, where Israeli attacks had flattened nearly every building in sight.
The team first spent several days at Gaza’s sole remaining hospital focussed on pediatrics—Al-Rantisi, in Gaza City, which was barely operational after Israeli air strikes. The roof had collapsed in places. Doctors were seeing patients in a waiting room with only a few cots. “It was very cold, even inside the buildings,” Hulse told me. When a storm blew through, she mistook thunderclaps for explosions. She learned that parents sometimes arrived with the bodies of infants who seemed to have died of hypothermia. Her team quickly put together a plan to help coördinate repairs, secure new electrical generators, implement a triage system, and organize trainings for staff. “We were just trying to get it functional again,” she said.
Next, Hulse travelled to Jabalia, in the northern reaches of the Gaza Strip, where the situation was even worse. She was driven through rutted streets in which not a single building remained intact. The area had previously been served by several health-care facilities, including a primary-care center—now destroyed—and... READ MORE https://www.newyorker.com/science/medical-dispatch/how-a-new-israeli-policy-cuts-off-humanitarian-aid-in-gaza
