No Ceasefire or Respite in Gaza
A Psychological & Humanitarian Disaster

by Yazeed Kamaldien, islamonline.net  

Feb 17, 2009

Although the "ceasefire" is technically announced, Gazans who were not killed, are not only coping with no food, water, and electricity- as before the Israeli onslaught, but are now also having to cope with denied access to healthcare, denied access to aid, and are forced to survive amidst a decimated infrastructure where sewerage spills into their lives where love and homes once existed. Photo-Journalist Yazeed Kamaldien discovered the following by spending one week in Gaza where psychological support teams are themselves in need of help.

 Countless injured Palestinians like Iman Kadoum are stuck with a debilitated healthcare system while they can’t pass through Gaza’s borders for better care.

 This nine-year-old girl and her mother were waiting to see a doctor at the Al Shifa Hospital. It is the largest public hospital in Gaza, but it can’t fulfill all the patients' needs. Waiting in line are more than 5,000 of Gaza’s residents who were injured during Israel’s 22-day bombing of the Palestinian territory.

 Iman has internal bleeding in her liver. Her mother, Najlaa Kadoum, said that they could get medical assistance for her daughter in France. Health officials had arranged all the necessary paperwork, and they would have covered the costs of the required operation, but when the mother and daughter reached the Palestinian border with Egypt, they were turned away.

 "The Egyptians [border officials] rudely told us that we’re lying. They told us to go back home. I hope that we can get to the right hospital. My child has a right to get this help," said Kadoum.

 Another young girl, Amira Elqarem, 15, looked exhausted during her interview at the hospital. From her hospital bed, she talked about how she managed to stay alive for three days – without medical assistance – after an Israeli missile hit her family’s home.  Amira’s father, sister and brother died in that attack though. Amira said she watched Israeli tanks enter Gaza while  she was trying to stop her right leg from bleeding with palm tree leaves. She crawled to another house where she was later taken to hospital by a journalist who lived in the house where she found safety.

 Amira needs effective medical treatment now though. She was also offered assistance

to go to a French hospital; however, the Egyptian authorities turned her away too. Egypt and Israel control access into and out of Gaza via the Egyptian border crossings with Palestine.

Hassan Khalaf, the assistant deputy health minister in Gaza, said that the territory faced a:

"…humanitarian and health disaster".

"Israel has also cut the power supply to Gaza. "We don’t get all the fuel that we need. This means we don’t have electricity regularly and that’s a big threat. If we have an electric cut now, at least 150 patients would die within 30 minutes," said Khalaf. 

"Sometimes we have to carry patients from one place to another at midnight because we need to go to hospitals that have electricity. It is very sad when we can’t help patients because we don’t have medicines or equipment. The borders are also closed, so patients can’t travel to hospitals where they can be treated."

 "International aid agencies have delivered emergency medical supplies to assist the Gaza health ministry", said Khalaf. "Not all of this has reached Gaza yet and some of it is held back at Israel’s borders", he added.

 The health ministry had set up seven warehouses for the storage of aid, which is distributed to hospitals. 'Gift of the Givers', a South African aid agency, was one of a few organizations that traveled to Gaza last month. It transported 84-tons of medical goods and relief aid to Gaza. It also recruited a 25-member medical team to travel to Gaza and work alongside Palestinian medical staff.

 The South African team of doctors said they had come across a "sub standard" public health system in Gaza. Yusuf Nanabhay, a physician at Milpark Hospital in Parktown, Johannesburg, said that "patients have no privacy".

"Beds have no mattresses, sheets or pillows. The equipment is also very old… All the local staff has been traumatized by the recent Israeli attacks. They just have to carry on working and they are under a lot of stress," he said.

 Reyhana Seedat, a psychotherapist with a private practice in Glenwood, Durban, worked at a rehabilitation hospital, but found that staff needed to be helped before they could treat patients.

One psychologist was severely traumatized. "I used a group method of desensitization for trauma with the staff. Then someone came in and said that we had to evacuate because the Israelis were going to bomb the hospital again," said Seedat.

"But the staff went on working and said they were not going to evacuate because they didn’t want to leave Gaza."

She added that the "…need for psychological treatment is tremendous".

"What concerns me is the trauma that children have suffered. If we don’t provide psychological treatment we are going to have another generation of very pathetic adults," she said.

 Imtiaz Sooliman, who heads the 'Gift of the Givers' aid agency, said that not all its relief had reached Gaza. He said some of it awaited clearance at Egyptian and Israeli borders. And these borders – ultimately – govern the patients’ chances of life or death.

Yazeed Kamaldienis a freelance journalist and photographer from South Africa. Yazeed completed a four-year journalism course at the Peninsula Technikon in Cape Town and a post-graduate diploma in media management at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa. His work spans across print, broadcast, and online media outlets. His journalistic work has taken him to various countries.

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Link to this page :

http://www.holylandfree.org/NoTreguaGaza-CatastrofeUmanPsic-en.htm