No meals, fainting medical staff: Gaza hospitals haunted by starvation

By Patrick Kingsley, Bilal Shbair & Rawan Sheikh Ahmad

 

In several of the hospitals still functioning in Gaza, nurses are fainting from hunger and dehydration. Managers often cannot provide meals for patients or medical staff. Doctors are running low on formula for newborn babies, 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 Friday with seven doctors — four from Gaza, and three volunteers from Australia, Britain and the US. 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 this month of starvation in the territory, nearly half of the total such deaths since the war began 22 months ago, according to data released on Saturday 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. Weak and dizzy, medics are passing out in the wards, where colleagues revive them with saline and glucose drips. Persistently short of basic tools such as antibiotics and painkillers, doctors are also running out of the special intravenous drips used to feed depleted patients. 

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. “I have seen ones that are imminently about to pass away,” said Ambereen Sleemi. The babies were brought to the hospital “starving and malnourished,” Dr. Sleemi said in a phone interview on Friday. 

One-third of Palestinians in Gaza are forced to go without food for days in a row, the World Food Program 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. 

Late on Saturday night, the Israeli military began to drop airborne aid over northern Gaza.

 

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