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A voice from Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital: “We are alone now. No one hears us”

An MSF surgeon in Gaza shares a message with the world from inside Al-Shifa Hospital while it is under Israeli bombardment.

MSF teams treat a patient at al Shifa Hospital while a woman sits in the next bed.

MSF staff treat a young patient at Al Shifa Hospital on October 19. Palestine 2023 © MSF

UPDATE 11/14/23: This morning in Gaza, bullets were fired into one of three MSF premises located near Al-Shifa Hospital and sheltering MSF staff and their families—over 100 people, including 65 children, who ran out of food yesterday night. MSF has been trying to evacuate them for the past three days. We are asking the Israeli army and Hamas for safe passage for them to leave the epicenter of intense fighting currently ongoing in Gaza City.

For the past 24 hours, hospitals in Gaza have been under relentless bombardment, with patients and medical staff trapped. Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) surgeon Dr. Mohammed Obeid shares a voice note from Al-Shifa Hospital while it is currently under fire.

His message: We need help. 

MSF urgently reiterates our calls to stop the attacks against hospitals, for an immediate ceasefire, and for the protection of medical facilities, medical staff and patients, and to allow people who wish to leave the hospitals the ability to do so.

Transcript:


The situation now is very bad. There is no Internet. Sometimes we [can use] cell phones. 

We're on the fourth floor. There's a sniper who attacked four patients inside the hospital. One of the patients has a gunshot wound directly in his neck, and he is a quadriplegic, and the other one [was shot] in the abdomen. Some of the people went outside the hospital, they want to go to the south. They bombed them—they bombed their family. 

In Al-Shifa Hospital today, since this morning, there has been no electricity, there is no water, there is no food. Our team is exhausted. We have two neonate patients who died, because the incubator is not working because there is no electricity. Also we have an adult patient in the ICU, he died because the ventilator shut down, because there is no electricity. 

We can see the smoke around the hospital. They [Israeli military] hit everything around the hospital. And they hit the hospital many times. 

URGENT: Patients and medical staff trapped in hospitals under fire in Gaza

Read the statement

The situation, as I said before, is very bad. We are nearly sure that we are alone now. No one hears us. We want someone to give us the guarantee that they can evacuate the patients. Because we have about 600 patients who need medical care and who need to evacuate. 

The problem is [we need] to be sure that we can evacuate the neonatal patients because we have about 37 to 40 premature babies. We have about 17 other patients in the ICU, and we have about 600 postoperative patients who need medical care. So the situation is very bad. We need help. No one hears us.

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