‘There Needs to Be an Immediate Ceasefire’: Doctor Who Worked in Gaza Says Israel’s Bombings Aren’t War, But ‘Annihilation’
An American doctor who recently worked on patients in Gaza shared what he saw in the densely populated territory, which has been under siege since the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attacks on Israel.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to destroy Hamas in response to the killings of 1,200 Israelis. Since then, Israel’s invasion and bombings have killed more than 28,000 Palestinians while displacing more than 80% of the population. The Israel Defense Forces are seemingly on the verge of invading the city of Rafah on Egypt’s border, where scores of displaced Palestinians have fled. Currently, there are some 1.5 million Gazans in Rafah, which normally has a population of fewer than 200,000.
If Israel invades the city, its residents will seemingly have nowhere to go.
The United States has expressed concerns about an invasion of Rafah, but also pledged to veto Tuesday’s U.N. Security Council vote on a resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire. In response, the U.S. has proposed another resolution calling for a temporary ceasefire that would be contingent on Hamas releasing the remaining Israeli hostages.
On Monday’s edition of The Source, Kaitlan Collins spoke with Dr. Irfan Galaria. Collins noted that Galaria wrote an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times about his experience in Gaza, stating that, “what I witnessed during the next 10 days in Gaza was not war — it was annihilation.”
Galaria told Collins:
I was in Gaza in 2009 and I’ve been in dozens of other places where I’ve operated under poor conditions. So, I thought I was prepared for what I was going to see here when I went to Gaza this time. But what I walked into was a vastly different situation. What I witnessed was an utter collapse of the healthcare system. Hospitals have been destroyed. There’s not even in a physical space or capacity to care for all the civilian casualties. We don’t have enough operating rooms to treat their patients. Physicians have been killed. They have been detained. There’s a significant lack of medical supplies.
As a matter of fact, the infection risk in the operating rooms is 100% because we don’t have adequate equipment and supplies, even maintain sterile fields, which is something unthinkable and unimaginable what we have here in America, and what’s especially frustrating is that I and my colleagues had to perform several amputations while I was there simply because we didn’t have access to the proper medical equipment and resources that we have here in America. Those amputations could have been avoided.
Collins noted Galaria’s op-ed stated that at one point, he stopped counting how many orphans he had operated on.
He replied:
Yeah, you know, the toll that this war has taken has been incredible. Kaitlan, I’m not naive to war. I understand war is horrendous and there’s gonna be collateral damage. However, to see over one million people displaced is just too much.
And what needs to be done here is there needs to be an immediate ceasefire. The toll that this war is taking is significant on their civilian population. I saw when I was in a Rafah, over one million people struggling to survive, trying to find shelter, food, and water all while trying to manage and bear a war.
Galaria said that he hopes to return to Gaza at some point to resume his work.
Watch above via CNN.
