'The Pain Of Operating Without Anesthesia...' A Doctor On Gaza's Health Crisis

I had never experienced this in any war zone before, running out of anaesthetics and being forced to operate on people without anaesthesia. I had never imagined such a thing in my life. I had been in Yemen, Iraq, and Syria, but I had never thought that I would inflict pain on people by doing surgery without anaesthesia. There was no other option. Patients whose wounds had been bandaged for days and weeks were becoming infected. The infection would reach the bloodstream, and they would die, so I had to do it, even in the absence of anaesthesia.

It happened to both children and adults. It was one of the most difficult things I have ever had to do in my career.  

Gaza’s whole health system had 2,500 beds before the war and ended up with 35,000 to 37,000 wounded people. At the same time, the Israelis were taking out one hospital after another and so your capacity to treat was getting less, you were using all of the consumables and getting more and more wounded. Eventually, everything was running out. Initially, it was the antiseptic solution that we replaced with washing liquid and vinegar and then morphine. We ended up not being able to give painkillers to patients who were having surgery and then we had to do surgery without any anaesthetic. 

One of the things that kept going through my mind throughout the whole war is that this is Benny Morris’s war. Benni Morris is an Israeli historian who wrote a book saying, that the biggest mistake Israel made was not expelling Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza as the Americans had done with the native Americans, as the Turks had done with the Greeks, and that the only survival of the Zionist project is a completion of the expulsion of Palestinians. It is obvious that the plan was being planned, turning Gaza into an uninhabitable place, causing Palestinians to leave, and those who were not killed would eventually leave on their own. That’s why the health system was an intrinsic military target, in creating this deadly environment. For that, you have to destroy the water and sewage systems, but you also have to ensure that there is no treatment for over 35,000 wounded.

(Dr Ghassan Abu Sittah is a British Palestinian surgeon. In an interview to a YouTube channel, he discusses Gaza's collapsed health sector and how he was forced to operate on patients without anaesthesia.)

(compiled by Shahina K.K from the interview given)