AhlulBayt News Agency: Two British doctors who worked in the Gaza Strip during the Israeli genocidal war have issued dire predictions over the long-term health of Palestinian civilians, warning that large numbers of them will continue to die.
“The prevalence of infectious diseases and multiple health problems linked to malnutrition, alongside the destruction of hospitals and killing of medical experts, meant mortality rates among Palestinians in Gaza would remain high after the cessation of Israeli shelling,” according to the Guardian newspaper on Saturday.
The Guardian quoted British-Palestinian reconstructive surgeon, Ghassan Abu-Sitta, who worked at Al-Shifa and Al-Ahli Arab hospitals in Gaza City shortly after the war started, as saying that levels of malnutrition there were so acute that many children would “never recover.”
“Scientists have estimated that the total deaths from Israel’s war on Gaza could ultimately be as high as 186,000. The figure is almost four times higher than the 46,700 deaths that Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry has reported,” the Guardian said.
Prof. Nizam Mamode, a retired British transplant surgeon from Hampshire who last year worked at Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza, said the number of “non-trauma deaths” could ultimately be considerably higher than 186,000. One factor, he said, was the targeting of healthcare workers during the war.
He said that of six vascular surgeons who once covered the north of the Strip, just one had remained, while there were no cancer pathologists left alive.
Abu-Sitta said entire teams of medical specialists had been eradicated from Gaza, and the training needed for replacing them would take up to 10 years.
“Certain specialties have been eviscerated,” he said. “There are no more nephrologists [a doctor specializing in kidney care] left. They’ve all been killed. There are no more board-certified emergency medicine physicians.”
Abu-Sitta, a 55-year-old plastic surgeon from London, said the long-term health of people in Gaza depends on how quickly the territory and its infrastructure would be rebuilt.
“Last week, thousands of Palestinians began returning to northern Gaza to scenes of utter destruction after the withdrawal of Israeli troops from a strategic corridor that divides the north and south of Gaza,” the Guardian pointed out.
“But to get doctors to move back to the north, you need to house them. Where are they going to live? Where are their families going to live?” Abu-Sitta said.
He stressed that irreversible damage had already been done to large numbers of children.
“Studies on people who survived the second world war showed they are more likely to get NCDs [non-communicable diseases] if they had malnutrition as children. They’re also more likely to become diabetics, more likely to have hypertension, more likely to have diabetes in old age. You don’t recover,” he explained.
Last month, the UN estimated that more than 60,000 children in Gaza would need treatment for acute malnutrition in 2025, and pointed out that some of those kids had already died.
“Another concern is the spread of disease, helped by the destruction of infrastructure such as sewage facilities,” the Guardian said.
Abu-Sitta has provided evidence to Scotland Yard and the International Criminal Court over what he witnessed working in Gaza. He described the prevalence of disease there as a “catastrophe.”
“Hepatitis, diarrheal disease, respiratory disease, polio that re-emerged in the war, will all continue because there’s still no sewerage and clean drinking water, still no housing, no primary-care clinics. You’re not going to be able to stop or even stem infectious diseases,” he said.
He warned of the spread of drug-resistant bacteria, recounting an instance when six out of seven consecutive patients he saw had “multiple drug-resistant bacteria.”
In addition to the long-term impacts, Abu-Sitta said 13,000 Gazans required immediate surgical interventions from war wounds. “The sheer number of complex injuries that need treatment means that it’s going to consume the health system for a generation,” he said.
Both doctors said the brutality and number of injuries they witnessed while working in Gaza was hard to overstate. Mamode, who gave evidence to MPs on the British parliament’s international development select committee inquiry into Gaza’s healthcare, said up to 70 percent of those he operated on were children.
“You’d have a three-year-old in intensive care for a week and we’d be told, ‘The parents are killed, the siblings are killed. Wait and see whether anyone is going to turn up for them.’ That was quite common,” Mamode said.
Abu-Sitta also said that half of his patients were children and that despite working in numerous conflict zones including Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen, he had never performed as many amputations each day as he had in Gaza.
Mamode, a former clinical lead of transplant surgery at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust in London, warned that another vital long-term health issue was the psychological scarring on a population after 15 months of fighting.
“In the coming months, those issues will start to come to the fore because people have just been focusing on day-to-day survival. When that pressure comes off [the psychological impacts] are going to manifest themselves in all sorts of ways,” he said.
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