An Australian doctor working at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City has said the situation there is “like a horror movie”.
Dr Nada Abu Alrub, who travelled to Gaza with the Palestinian Australian New Zealand Medical Association (PANZMA), said she regularly sees dead bodies “shredded into pieces”.
Speaking to RTÉ’s News at One, she said entire families are being wiped out.
“The situation is unliveable. Any apartment or anything you see around you, any house, is already burnt out or destroyed. There’s a smell of sewage, there’s no clean water, there’s no food. If you find any it’s very, very expensive or impossible to get because there’s no money allowed in,” she said.
“People are either dying by being bombed or shot or starved to death or they’re evacuated elsewhere to go in a tent. The hospital has run out of everything. There’s no beds, there’s no mattresses for the beds, there’s no gloves, there’s no gauze.
Dr Abu Alrub described how doctors have been working in these conditions for two years, live in the hospital and work 24/7.
A picture shows rubble and destroyed buildings in the al-Tuffah neighbourhood of Gaza City
“Most of them have lost everything they have,” she said.
“They’ve evacuated many times, including to the hospital. They’ve lost many family members or they have them with severe disabilities and need to look after them. They don’t know what to do.
“It’s just impossible. Every single thing is very difficult in every single way. It’s scary, it’s difficult, it’s unliveable and you just don’t understand how this is OK in this day and age.”
Dr Abu Alrub said it was “very difficult” to bring in supplies like baby formula and medical equipment when she arrived in Gaza.
She said each doctor is only allowed to bring in $280, no matter how long they are staying for, and half of that is taken at the border for “transport” costs.
Relatives of people killed in Israeli attacks mourn as bodies are brought to Al Shifa hospital
She said that while she would like to save every life, she often must choose which patients have a higher chance of survival.
“You do what you can with the most limited supplies and hardly any sterilisation. It’s a survival mode,” she said.
“The nurses and doctors and medical students have been working here non stop for two years. They sleep for two hours and come back.”
Dr Abu Alrub said that while her time in Gaza is due to finish early next month, she does not have the heart to leave and she would like to stay for as long as she can.
Israel army says projectile fired from Gaza City
Meanwhile, the Israeli military said a projectile was launched today from Gaza City, which the army is currently pressing a major ground offensive to capture.
“A short while ago, a projectile that was launched from Gaza City toward the area of Nahal Oz was identified,” an army statement said, referring to a community near the Gaza border.
“An attempt was made to intercept the projectile, and the results are under review,” it added.
No group immediately claimed responsibility for the launch.
In recent weeks, the Israeli military has launched a heavy air and ground assault on Gaza City that it says is aimed at eliminating Hamas fighters from the territory’s largest urban centre.
“The bombing is intense — from warplanes, tanks, and constant gunfire from drones,” Saja Al-Kharoubi, a 26-year-old resident of the city’s Al-Daraj neighborhood, told AFP.
“People are being forced to flee, but where can we go? We have no money, not even for transportation. The entire situation is dangerous everywhere.”
AFP footage showed plumes of smoke rising over Gaza City as Palestinians carrying their belongings fled southwards.
The Israeli military said yesterday that more than 550,000 people had so far fled the city. The UN in late August estimated there were about one million people living in the area.
In his Rosh Hashanah message marking the Jewish new year, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to continue “prevailing over our enemies” in the year ahead.
“We are determined to achieve all the goals of our war: not only in Gaza, not only in completing the elimination of Hamas, securing the release of our abductees, and ensuring that Gaza will no longer pose a threat to Israel, but also in other arenas,” he said in a statement.
The war in Gaza was sparked by Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack on Israel, which resulted in the deaths of 1,219 people, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
During their attack, Palestinian militants also took 251 hostages, of whom 47 remain in Gaza, including 25 the Israeli military says are dead.
Israel’s retaliatory military response has killed at least 65,344 people in Gaza, also mostly civilians, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry, whose figures the United Nations considers reliable.
Five killed, including three children, in Israeli attack on Lebanon
An Israeli drone strike has killed five people, including three children, in the southern Lebanese town of Bint Jbeil yesterday, Lebanon’s health ministry said.
Israel has frequently targeted what it calls Hezbollah positions in southern Lebanon despite a US-brokered truce between Lebanon and Israel which took effect in November following more than a year of conflict sparked by war in Gaza.
Lebanon’s state news agency said the strike hit a motorbike and a vehicle, wounding two others.
Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri said in a statement that a father and his three children were among the dead, with the mother wounded. He said they held US citizenship.
“While the situation is fluid, so far, indications are that the five killed were not US citizens. In fact, one had an unused immigrant visa petition in the past,” a US State Department spokesperson said.
The Israeli military said it killed a Hezbollah member in the strike but that “several uninvolved civilians were killed”.
“The IDF regrets any harm to uninvolved individuals and operates to minimise harm as much as possible. The incident is under review,” it said in a statement.
Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam, in a post on X, described the attack as a “blatant crime against civilians and a message of intimidation aimed at our people returning to their villages in the south”.
Lebanon is under pressure from the United States, Saudi Arabia and Hezbollah’s domestic rivals to disarm the Iranian-backed group.
Hezbollah has said it would be a serious misstep even to discuss disarmament while Israel is continuing airstrikes on Lebanon and occupying swaths of territory in its south.
Additional reporting: AFP
