For the past 24 hours, hospitals in Gaza have been under relentless bombardment, with patients and medical staff trapped. Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) surgeon Dr. Mohammed Obeid shares a voice note from Al-Shifa Hospital while it is currently under fire.
His message: We need help.
MSF urgently reiterates our calls to stop the attacks against hospitals, for an immediate ceasefire, and for the protection of medical facilities, medical staff and patients, and to allow people who wish to leave the hospitals the ability to do so.
The situation now is very bad. There is no Internet. Sometimes we [can use] cell phones.
We're on the fourth floor. There's a sniper who attacked four patients inside the hospital. One of the patients has a gunshot wound directly in his neck, and he is a quadriplegic, and the other one [was shot] in the abdomen. Some of the people went outside the hospital, they want to go to the south. They bombed them—they bombed their family.
In Al-Shifa Hospital today, since this morning, there has been no electricity, there is no water, there is no food. Our team is exhausted. We have two neonate patients who died, because the incubator is not working because there is no electricity. Also we have an adult patient in the ICU, he died because the ventilator shut down, because there is no electricity.
We can see the smoke around the hospital. They [Israeli military] hit everything around the hospital. And they hit the hospital many times.
URGENT: Patients and medical staff trapped in hospitals under fire in Gaza
Read the statementThe situation, as I said before, is very bad. We are nearly sure that we are alone now. No one hears us. We want someone to give us the guarantee that they can evacuate the patients. Because we have about 600 patients who need medical care and who need to evacuate.
The problem is [we need] to be sure that we can evacuate the neonatal patients because we have about 37 to 40 premature babies. We have about 17 other patients in the ICU, and we have about 600 postoperative patients who need medical care. So the situation is very bad. We need help. No one hears us.
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