Yahoo – AFP, Guillaume Lavallee, 4 Aug 2014
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Doctors
treat three-year-old Yamin, suffering from severe burns and
multiple fractures,
at the Shifa hospital in Gaza City, on August 3, 2014
|
Lying on
his bed in a Gaza hospital, three-year-old Yamin now sees the world from behind
burns which have disfigured him for life.
The tiny
boy is just one of hundreds of burn victims and those wounded by Israeli shell
fire overwhelming Gaza's sole working operating theatre for plastic surgeons.
He also has
burns on his back and multiple fractures suffered when an Israeli strike
decimated his family and destroyed their home in Al-Buraj, central Gaza, last
week.
It was the
evening. The start of Eid al-Fitr, the festival marking the end of the Muslim
holy month of Ramadan.
In a single
strike, the house was turned to rubble and 19 people lay dead. Yamin,
miraculously, was the sole survivor but he was left an orphan and badly burnt.
He was
taken to a clinic then rapidly transferred to the burns department at the Shifa
hospital in Gaza, where he cries, lying naked, and where a handful of surgeons
are now confronted with the endless horrors of the war.
Every day
ambulances rush in with shattered lives: charred or bloodied humans who will
die a few hours later on their stretchers.
The
survivors transfer to an operating table, sometimes the modest one in the burns
unit, the only one in the whole of Gaza that plastic surgeons can use.
Local
medics say 1,829 Palestinians, mostly civilians according to the UN, have died
since the latest confrontation between Israel and Hamas began on July 8.
At least
another 9,000 have been hurt, many seriously.
"There
are very few light injuries in this war," says Ghassan Abu Sitta, a
plastic surgeon from the American University of Beirut, sent a week ago by the
Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP) organisation to help out in Gaza.
"My
feeling is around 70 percent would have some kind of permanent deformity,
either in terms of scarring or in terms of functional deformity... They will
never be the same again."
His worst
case? "An 8 year-old boy who basically lost half of his face including one
eye and lost the other eye with shrapnel in. What I needed to do is reconstruct
the face just to cover the wounds.
 |
Doctors
treat three-year-old Yamin, suffering from severe burns and
multiple fractures,
at the Shifa hospital in Gaza City, on August 3, 2014
|
"The
eyes are lost. He lost all his family, his ability to care for himself has been
completely destroyed. There is no future for him, he keeps asking why they have
turned the lights off," Dr Abu Sitta says.
"The
size and the magnitude of the carnage that has affected Gaza is beyond the
capacity of any health system, let alone a health system that has struggled
with eight years of siege," says the surgeon, who was also in Gaza during
Israel's 'Cast Lead' operation at the end of 2008 and start of 2009.
This time
the fighting has caused more deaths and more wounded. And worse injuries.
"The
fact that we are unable to evacuate patients outside Gaza means that all of
these patients are inside the system," the surgeon says.
Then he
turns away to perform a skin graft on a young man with a pierced foot and 10
centimetre (four inch) crater on his calf, through which his tibia is visible.
Hospitals
struck
For the
past month, every day brings deliveries of bodies, wounded people and trauma to
Gaza's hospitals.
"We
are now looking at a health and humanitarian disaster," James Rawley, UN
humanitarian co-ordinator for the Palestinian territories, said at the weekend.
A third of hospitals
have been hit during the fighting and the violence has prevented nearly half of
medical staff from reaching the clinics and health centres that are still
standing.
"The
current state of the health system is disastrous because the people are exhausted,
many hospitals have been affected by the bombardments, and people are afraid to
go to hospital," as sometimes shooting is taking place along their route,
says Nicolas Palarus, head of operations in Gaza for Doctors Without Borders.
Palestinian
medical staff, the backbone of the local health system, face "stress from
the fighting, being far from the family, separated, widespread fatigue, lack of
some medicines," he says.
"From
primary healthcare to the big hospitals, the whole chain is disrupted. The system
is in a catastrophic state," Palarus says.
On this day
in the burns unit, medical workers paint an antibacterial ointment onto little
Yamin, naked, frail and frightened. It will help his skin scar over.
But his
cousin and her husband, now his guardians, interrupt. Maybe the best thing for
the tiny tot, they say, would be to evacuate him from Gaza. To get him far away
from the horrors of the war.
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