Broome nurse Rebecca Smith is in the red zone in Gaza, dealing with a fresh flood of patients, treating many of them on the floor, in the blood of those who came before them.
Smith is volunteering with Doctors Without Borders at Al-Aqsa hospital, which is crammed with the dead and hundreds of wounded, mostly women and children, after heavy Israeli ground and air strikes on June 8-9.
Rebecca Smith is one of many working around the clock to treat mass casualties in Gaza.
Her team leader Karin Huster said the smell of blood in the emergency room was unbearable.
“The situation is apocalyptic,” she said.
“There are people lying everywhere, on the floor, outside ... bodies were being brought in plastic bags.
“The situation is overwhelming.
“This man-made catastrophe needs to stop now.”
Smith has worked in Ethiopia and Ukraine and said while all conflicts were awful, Gaza was different because of the huge number of displaced people in one area.
“The number of people crammed into this tiny area with makeshift tents, with overcrowding, poor ventilation, no access to clean drinking water, no effective sanitation facilities, and really high food insecurity is just mind-boggling,” she said.
“In Al-Aqsa hospital, the displaced people have made themselves tents within the hospital, with used IV lines and blankets draped over these, to make themselves a little private area among the crush of humanity.
“The staff are completely overwhelmed and it’s very hard to tell who’s a patient and who’s living there.”
Rebecca Smith treating patients in the red zone in Gaza.
Smith said the Rafah crossing had been closed for a month, with no replenishment of medical supplies since the start of June to treat the influx of patients streaming in with blast injuries, broken legs, burns and shrapnel wounds.
“To deny people access to basic medical equipment like gauze and gloves, things that are needed, it’s unspeakable,” she said.
“There is a shortage of analgesia especially, a shortage of paralysing agents and things you need for intubation.
“We use ketamine for pretty much everything; how long that supply will last, who knows?
“Whether the trauma of the event itself has given you some mental health issues – which it absolutely will – or you’ve got a serious injury that will be with you lifelong, the chances of coming out properly rehabilitated are very, very small.”
Smith said staff were performing magnificently in appalling conditions, with a UN cap on fuel leading to frequent blackouts at the hospital where there was only one working generator.
“Last week a woman on a ventilator died because there was just too many critical patients, the blackout happened and no one ‘bagged’ her, and she died, which is terribly sad – all for a lack of resources and simple things that we take for granted, like power,” she said.
“I’m so tired, every night we don’t sleep for very long, maybe two hours at a stretch because of air strikes and shelling. The drones are relentless and people have been living like this for eight months.”
Smith said the most traumatic injuries involved children.
“It is very hard to say, ‘we can’t fix this person, we have limited resources and there’s just too many, and this one today we cannot help.’ That is very, very difficult, and you think about it often, about the ones that have gone to the black zone. All we’re trying to do is save as many as we can, under extreme duress.”
Smith said the experience had shown her the best and worst of humanity.
She described staff working shifts 24 hours long then going “home” to sleep in a tent on a beach without toilets or showers and beach location, constantly worried by sandflies.
“She said while she had no view one way or the other on a complicated political situation, she believed the killing of women and children who had “no part in any of this political playground of men” was not right.
“I just wish for the Australian people to understand that people here are just like us. They love their air-conditioners, they love cool soft drinks, their falafels are outstanding. These are people just like us; and they are really, really suffering.”
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