Many Children in Gaza Need Amputations. We Can Treat Their Physical Wounds But Not Their Mental Anguish

When new patients come to the emergency room they are treated on the floors by doctors who kneel in blood to try and save their lives. This can’t continue. We need a ceasefire now

Following more than 110 days of all-out assault and siege by Israeli forces, Gaza’s healthcare system has now virtually collapsed, at a time when the medical needs are soaring.

There is no safe place left for Gaza’s inhabitants – as bombing, sniper fire, drone strikes, and evacuation orders have pushed the population and most of those providing desperately needed medical care to a small area in the south.

The organisation I represent, Medecins Sans Frontieres/Doctors Without Borders (MSF), provides emergency medical care and urgent surgical treatment in five hospitals in southern Gaza, where most of Gaza’s 2.3 million inhabitants have been forcibly displaced. The medical response is on the brink.

No conflict is the same. I have witnessed much human suffering as part of my work providing healthcare with MSF during brutal wars in Bosnia, Chechnya, Sri Lanka and Iraq. In Gaza, the scale and intensity of its bombardment and the rate of indiscriminate killing, injury and maiming unleashed on a civilian population is like nothing I have seen before. Gaza and the hospitals I worked in during 2006 are now unrecognisable.

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