LOS ANGELES, United States — A volunteer emergency medicine doctor who recently returned from Gaza City says he is not surprised that Israeli forces targeted a journalists’ tent outside Al-Shifa Hospital, describing the situation at the medical complex as one of “indiscriminate killing” and extreme deprivation.
“Al-Shifa Hospital is the largest hospital in Palestine but it has been invaded twice and burned down by the Israeli military,” said Dr. Aslam Akhtar, who left Gaza two days ago after weeks of volunteering in the emergency department. “There are many tents outside the hospital as well that are used as an ER. But the actual 800-bed hospital has been burned down, and it’s totally incapable of being used right now.”
Dr. Akhtar said that every patient he treated — whether suffering from injuries or illness — was severely malnourished. “When I hugged my colleagues after returning to Gaza, I wanted to cry because I’d feel how much weight they’d lost,” he said. “I would feel the skin and bones of their back, because even the doctors, the nurses, even the chair of the emergency department, had lost so much weight due to the current man-made famine there.”
His testimony comes days after an Israeli strike killed five journalists, including two Al Jazeera correspondents, in a tent outside Al-Shifa Hospital. The medical facility, once the largest in the Gaza Strip, is now operating only through makeshift field units amid ongoing bombardment.
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