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The worst were the screaming people whose limbs had to be amputated almost without anesthesia and whose burns could be disinfected with nothing but vinegar. “It hurts incredibly, incredibly,” says Diyani Dewasurendra (40). But doctors in Gaza hospitals had no choice.
Within 48 hours of the start of the Israeli attack on the Palestinian coastal strip on October 7, they had exhausted all their emergency medical supplies or transferred them to the government. Medicines for cancer patients, bandages for war victims, painkillers for women in labor: everything was missing. Also the power to comfort those who have suffered the war like no other and who are known in the Gaza Strip only as WCNSFs.
The abbreviation stands for ‘Wounded Children with No Surviving Family’. Left in misery, alone, without anyone. This shouldn’t happen to anyone. And yet you encounter such children everywhere in the Gaza Strip.
When Diyani Dewasurendra talks about these moments, she still cries today. Then she swallows, apologizes briefly and calmly talks again about the 26 days she spent as a doctor in the middle of the war in Gaza.
Brutal decisions in the hospital
In the summer, the Austrian moved to Gaza City to set up an emergency room. It was her fourth deployment to the Doctors Without Borders organization – and by far her most difficult. But if medicine does not help those who really need it, it lacks soul and misses its purpose.
And hardly anywhere do people currently need medicine as urgently as in the Gaza Strip. More than 10,000 people were killed there in Israeli retaliation after Hamas terrorist attacks. About 70 percent of the victims are women and children, Hamas says. She cannot verify that, says Dewasurendra. Statistics are a difficult thing in the midst of chaotic horror.
“We operated in the corridors, often had no electricity and had to make brutal decisions about who to treat and who not to treat,” said the doctor when she met SonntagsBlick in Vienna. The staff was extremely tired. “And when I fell into bed late at night, exhausted, I hardly dared to go to sleep because I didn’t want to be woken up at one in the morning by the bombs.”
800 calories and 1.5 liters of water per day – at over 30 degrees
Six days before the Austrian was one of just under 500 people given a permit to leave Gaza, her team ran out of drinking water. “We had been strictly rationing for days: one and a half liters of water and 800 calories per day per person, despite temperatures well above 30 degrees.”
As Gaza City came under increasing fire, her organization withdrew its international staff from the north. “We ended up in a community center with 45,000 refugee people. There were fourteen toilets and three showers.” Dewasurendra had nothing to help the suffering persons. Fainting in the midst of the pain, in the midst of the screams.
Diyani Dewasurendra does not want to talk about the Hamas terrorists, who, according to the Israeli forces, are hiding in corridors under hospitals in the Gaza Strip. She is not allowed to do that. Your organization has made this its mission: to help everywhere, and take sides nowhere. The fact is: Al-Shifa Hospital, the largest hospital in the Gaza Strip, had to stop its activities on Saturday evening due to heavy Israeli shelling. Israel says Hamas fighters were hiding inside. The hospital management says: nonsense. Apparently 39 newborns were also killed in the attack.
Dewasurendra hesitates to talk about the noise of these attacks in the middle of the night, the explosions, the missiles, the bombs, the fighter jets. “At some point you will learn to distinguish between all these sounds.” Today, she is still sensitive to noise and has difficulty finding her way around her home on Lake Wörthersee in the idyllic south of Austria.
She wants to go back – for two reasons
She can’t shake the feeling of being at her mercy. «In Gaza we moved our team five times. But you can’t hide from this war.’ When she thinks about the more than 300 local colleagues who are still stuck on the site, tears well up in her eyes again. Mohammed, the driver who had to pull his three-year-old child from the rubble of his house. The colleague who had lost her entire family. This is the horrific daily life in the Gaza Strip this fall.
Several humanitarian organizations, including Doctors Without Borders, are calling for an immediate ceasefire to rescue the wounded and sick from the chaos. “If the war continues like this, the healthcare system will completely collapse very soon,” says Dewasurendra. The result: no help for premature babies, bleeding babies or victims of diarrhea, which quickly spread in the overcrowded shelters.
She doesn’t even want to think about it. And yet she wants to return to Gaza quickly. To help people who desperately need it. And to pick up her cuddly toy hippo “Hank”. The mascot has been included on all their foreign missions to date. It didn’t fit in the small backpack she was allowed to take with her when she left the country. Hank is stuck in Gaza, along with almost two and a half million desperate people, in the middle of the war.
Source: Blick
I am Amelia James, a passionate journalist with a deep-rooted interest in current affairs. I have more than five years of experience in the media industry, working both as an author and editor for 24 Instant News. My main focus lies in international news, particularly regional conflicts and political issues around the world.
