“It’s inhumane”: Dr Tanya Haj-Hassan describes conditions Gaza doctors are working in
Dr Tanya Haj-Hassan, a paediatric intensive care doctor for Doctors Without Borders and a co-founder of the GazaMedicVoices social platform, reflects in an interview on the on-going struggle of doctors in Gaza who are working under dearth of basic medical supplies.
“I refuse to let my imagination go to the places where reality has taken us in these last three weeks.” she said.
“Everyday I feel like things can’t get worse, and then they seem to get worse.”
Dr. Tanya asserted Gaza doctors are “World class experts in the field of medicine and in the field of mass casualties” but she goes on to remark that having to carry out medical procedures without pain control or anaesthesia “makes it sound very barbaric.”
With “hands tied” and being “stripped of every tool” used in modern medicine — from anaesthesia to ventilators and monitors — it is an unfathomable place to be in, she described.
“I can’t fathom being in the position that they are in,” she stated, highlighting that the doctors in Gaza are working every day despite the trauma they are seeing, despite fear for their family’s well being, despite fear for their own life, and constantly being threatened to be bombed in the health facility because they “refuse to leave” their patients and evacuate.
“I’ve never been in that position and I don’t know many people that have been in that position to be honest. The conditions that we’re seeing in the Gaza strip right now are unthinkable.” she added, calling it “unprecedented in modern times”.
She further highlighted in her interview that the children there are coming in with 70-90 per cent of their bodies burned, stressing that doctors would normally and “obviously” give them immediate pain control. And a regular change of dressing would be carried out under sterile conditions; and if the burns are extensive, they are put to sleep for the process because it is so “exquisitely painful”.
But in Gaza, pain relief is not an option.
Dr. Tanya also quoted the doctors currently serving in Gaza who, to describe their situation, used words like “inhumane”, “intolerable”, “unbearable”.
“They are crying out to the outside world and many of them are giving up. They’re saying the world has come together to eliminate us,” she reiterated.
Others say, “They are deaf and blind to our suffering. All we have is God.”