The desperate reality of a surgeon in Gaza

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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

The writer is a consultant plastic and reconstructive surgeon and former vice-president of the Royal College of Surgeons of England who travelled to Gaza with the IDEALS charity

Earlier this month I was operating on a 17-year-old girl who had been orphaned during an air strike in Gaza. Under theatre drapes improvised from surgical gowns, and with knife blades gripped dangerously in forceps for lack of sterilised handles, I tried in vain to excise the tissues riddled with shrapnel damage. I knew that in these conditions, infection was highly likely; we duly amputated her leg a few days later.

My fortnight as a volunteer surgeon at the European Gaza Hospital near Khan Younis, in effect the last working health facility in south Gaza, was like nothing I had ever experienced before. I first visited the occupied strip 10 years ago during Operation Protective Edge — Israel’s military conflict with Hamas in 2014 — teaching and training local colleagues in reconstructive surgery techniques. Back then I was astonished at my patients’ brutal wounds, but nothing could have prepared me for the scale of humanitarian collapse in Gaza today. 

The hospital I once knew was unrecognisable, hidden behind a huge throng of people who had come to seek sanctuary in the compound. The corridors, and stairwells were filled with families taking refuge; children of all ages ran through the dimly lit passages. The Emergency Department was a scene of barely-organised chaos which would erupt with new patients after every shelling.

Despite the efforts of dedicated local colleagues, there was a devastating deterioration in surgical provision. Most aspects of ‘aseptic technique’ — the sterile method of surgery and wound care first described by Florence Nightingale in the Crimean war — had been abandoned for lack of appropriate equipment. It was astonishing to me…