Doctors Without Borders on Friday described chaos and terror seen at a key Gaza hospital before its staff were forced to flee amid a raid by the Israeli army.
In recent days, intense fighting has raged around the Nasser Hospital — one of the Palestinian territory’s last remaining major medical facilities that are still operational.
“The situation was chaotic, catastrophic,” said Christopher Lockyear, secretary-general of the medical charity which goes by its French acronym MSF.
The assessment adds to growing concern about a lack of equipment and medicine at Gaza hospitals, which one foreign medic said was forcing exhausted staff to make tough choices.
“We lack painkillers such as morphine and sedatives,” said Raphael Pitti, who spent two weeks at the European Hospital in Khan Yunis until February 6 with medical charity UOSSM.
“We have no other choice but to let the most seriously injured die without being able to make them comfortable, because otherwise they will take up personnel, resources, beds, medicines.
“That leaves others with less chance of survival,” he told AFP in Jerusalem.
Thursday’s Israeli raid on the Nasser Hospital, also in Khan Yunis, saw all MSF staff forced to flee the premises, said Lockyear, adding that one remained unaccounted for.
“We don’t know what has happened to them… We remain deeply concerned about their wellbeing,” Lockyear said in a joint interview with AFP and Reuters, adding that the organisation had already lost five staff members in the war.
The Israeli military said the raid followed “credible intelligence” to suggest hostages seized by Gaza militants in the October 7 attack that sparked the war had been held at the hospital.
It said later it had “not yet found any evidence of this”, although forces had found “weapons, grenades and mortar bombs” at the hospital complex and had detained more than “20 terrorists”.
– ‘Drop in the ocean’ –
The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza charged Friday that several patients had died due to a lack of oxygen after the raid when power was cut off and the generators stopped.
Lockyear said he could not confirm that, since MSF staff were no longer inside the hospital.
“We do know that people were killed and injured in the attack, but we don’t know how many,” he said.
Hamas’s October 7 attack resulted in the deaths of about 1,160 people in Israel, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
Militants also took about 250 people hostage, around 130 of whom are still in Gaza, including 30 who are presumed dead, according to Israeli figures.
Israel’s assault on Gaza has since killed at least 28,775 people, mostly women and children, according to the territory’s health ministry.
Israel has repeatedly accused Hamas militants of using hospitals for military purposes, something Hamas denies.
Lockyear said the chaotic scenes at Nasser hospital resembled those “replicated time and again in Gaza over the last few months”.
MSF had “worked with nine health facilities that have had to be evacuated in this chaos”, he said.
Lockyear stressed that MSF teams on the ground were working around the clock to provide desperately needed aid in Gaza, but in the current conditions they were struggling to provide even the basics.
“It’s really an illusion of aid,” he said. “The assistance that we are providing is a drop in the ocean.”
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