Smell Of Death Everywhere As Israeli Forces Encircle Gaza

The Israeli military has completed its encirclement of Gaza City, Israel Defense Forces spokesperson Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said Thursday with health officials in the city lamenting the spiral of death in the enclave.

The Israeli engineering corps is now working to locate and neutralize underground infrastructure, explosives and other threats to allow the IDF to move freely in the area, Hagari said.

Earlier Thursday, Israel Defense Forces chief of staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi said the Israeli military is surrounding Gaza City and “deepening” its operations there.

“Our forces are in very significant areas of Gaza City,” Halevi said.

In Al Shifa hospital, Gaza’s largest medical facility, a dazed and drowsy woman sits on the floor with a bleeding leg. A younger man lies flat on blood-stained tiles, his neck and legs wrapped in bandages.

The rest of the emergency room on Tuesday was crowded with men, women and children of different ages — some crying, some trembling and some asleep on makeshift beds on the floor.

“The situation in hospitals is miserable … (it) makes you weep,” Rajaa Musleh, a 50-year-old woman sheltering at Al Shifa told CNN on Thursday.

“There is no equipment, people are piled up on top of one another,” said Musleh, who is also Gaza’s country representative for the MedGlobal healthcare charity.

Musleh lost her home in Israel’s bombardment of Gaza and says that soon there won’t be any fuel left to power this hospital, which is housing both patients and the countless displaced who have nowhere else to go with fears of leading to more deaths.

More than 1.4 million people in Gaza were internally displaced as of Wednesday, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. More than half a million are seeking refuge in facilities run by the UN’s Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), which are accommodating numbers three times their intended capacity.

Piles of both trash and people line the hospital’s corridors, Musleh said, with many “sleeping on the floors because residents feel hospitals are safe.”

The smell of death is everywhere,” she said. “The smell of blood is everywhere.”

The Palestinian Ministry of Health in Ramallah warned Wednesday that the medical complex would be out of service in less than 24 hours as it runs out of the fuel needed to power generators.

Located in Gaza City, Al Shifa hospital is also becoming part of the front line, as Israel last week claimed that the facility is the site of a major Hamas command and control center.

Hospital staff are exhausted, Dr. Alaa Shitali, a medical officer at Al Shifa’s emergency department, told CNN Tuesday.

“You couldn’t, as a human being and a medical officer, bear this situation,” he said, standing in the emergency department, surrounded by patients.

Shitali has not seen his family for days and has to spend his nights at the hospital to treat the massive crowd of patients constantly flowing in. “We are overloaded,” he said.

Doctors at Al Shifa are also seeing children with the majority of their body and faces burned, missing limbs and other “catastrophic injuries,” said Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, a pediatric intensive care and humanitarian doctor with the aid group Doctors Without Borders, also known as Médecins Sans Frontières.

“And the doctors are left to treat them with limited pain control, (as they are) running out of anesthetic drugs.” she told CNN. “We do not have enough antibiotics to treat wound infections, we don’t have enough dressings.”

The few other remaining hospitals in Gaza are also suffering, with some completely shutting down leading to increased fears of more deaths.

Source: CNN

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