Australian doctors in Gaza recount horrific bloodshed, trauma

Deir el-Balah: Two Australian doctors returning from Gaza told AFP they had witnessed “slaughterhouse” scenes in the devastated territory, describing children torn apart by relentless Israeli bombardments and hospitals overwhelmed by the dead and wounded.

Saya Aziz, an anaesthetist, said that while images of the destruction in Gaza have flooded global media, they still fail to capture the full reality on the ground.

“The things that you didn’t get through the video was the smell, the wailing, the distress of the parents crying, witnessing their children dying, suffering in pain,” Aziz said on Saturday.

What Gaza was witnessing, she added, was “mass casualty after mass casualty”.

“Torn, disintegrated bodies, blood, broken heads, broken arms, chopped limbs — not just chopped, like disintegrated,” she said. “You would never see such scenes in your life, blood everywhere… It’s like a slaughterhouse.”

Aziz and fellow doctor Nada Abu al-Rub, a Palestinian-Australian, had been on a four-week mission to Gaza. They left the territory on Sunday morning.

Over the past two years, the devastation in Gaza has been vast, with entire neighbourhoods flattened and millions of tonnes of rubble now covering areas where families once lived.

Residential buildings, hospitals, schools, and water and sanitation systems have been hit hard by Israeli attacks, and the humanitarian consequences for the territory’s more than two million people have been severe.

Hundreds of thousands of homeless Gazans have crowded into shelters, makeshift camps and open areas, lacking even basic protections.

According to the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory, at least 67,139 people — mostly civilians — have been killed since Israel launched its military campaign following Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attacks.

The October 7 attacks on southern Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,219 people, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.

– Children hit hardest –

A vast number of the victims are women and children, as seen from video footage and pictures.

The territory’s children were suffering the most, Aziz said.

“The hardest has been for the children who are unwell, unconscious, bleeding — you’re having to anaesthetise them knowing they’ve got no surviving family members left,” she said.

“Who’s going to tell them, who’s going to look after them?”

Rub said Israeli authorities had restricted the entry of essential supplies, including baby formula and nutritional products for children.

“They basically threatened that any organisation that brings baby formula will be completely closed and no doctors” from that organisation would be allowed to enter Gaza again, Rub said.

“What is scary about baby formula?”

Peanut butter and total parenteral nutrition (TPN), which is critical for children recovering from major bowel surgeries, were also blocked, Rub said.

“Those bottles they broke and didn’t let us bring it in.”

Rub described the scenes she witnessed as “horrific”.

“People are dying from explosions, their bodies shredded into pieces, whole families wiped out or having one survivor (left) with severe injuries,” she said.

Every colleague she worked with had lost many family members, she added, along with their homes, personal possessions and cars.

“Everything they have is just lost, nothing is left here in Gaza to survive on.”