Fergal Harrington

This testimony from Paul Ley, a doctor at the European Hospital in Khan Yunis, Gaza, is absolutely sickening: “I have worked in hospitals in Afghanistan, Uganda, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Cambodia... but I have never operated on so many injured children as I am now in the Gaza Strip. In the burns unit of the European Hospital we now have 78 patients, nearly two-fifths of them children under five. I have never seen anything like it. I have been in many war contexts where the type of wounds are the same but the number is huge. We never leave the hospital. We work round the clock. We do operations with minimal anaesthesia. If we run out, we can’t operate but there is no clear line. There are a lot of people crying, screaming with pain, but we don’t have enough analgesics. We keep them for the kids or very severe cases. Normally we would change dressings on patients with 40% burns with them under sedation and minimise the time by using more attendants... Now it has to be done with a lot of pain. We try to keep our heads cool and steady, but for local staff this is their families, friends, their people. They never want to amputate. They say: ‘I can’t do it any more’ and so I say: ‘OK I will do it, don’t worry,’ and you can feel the relief”.