Health care workers and journalists in Gaza are reeling in the aftermath of two precise Israeli airstrikes on the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis on Monday. The attacks, minutes apart from each other, killed 22 people, including journalists who worked for the Associated Press, Reuters and Al Jazeera.
The first attack struck Hussam al-Masri, a Reuters cameraman who was at his typical station at the top of one of the hospital’s exposed stairwells with his camera providing a live feed of the surrounding area. He was directly killed in the first Israeli strike. The second strike came moments after, hitting the same location while first responders were handling victims from the first attack.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu initially called the strikes a “tragic mishap.” On Tuesday, the Israeli military said its initial inquiry into the incident found that infantry soldiers targeted what they believed was a Hamas camera at a hospital, observing troops. The military said that six of those killed in the attacks were militants and that Hamas based itself at the hospital. They did not provide any evidence for these claims.
When the attacks occurred, Anneliese Stephenson-Wenn, an intensive care unit nurse at Nasser Hospital, had been called to a training in Deir al Balah with the rest of her international colleagues. Stephenson-Wenn has spent the last three weeks volunteering with medical solidarity organization Glia at Nasser Hospital, Gaza’s largest remaining functional health care facility. She says the health care system is crippling as workers come under attack and Israel continues to block aid supplies.
“This is not a sustainable way for a health care system to work.” Stephenson-Wenn said. “And I think that that is by design.”
Stephenson-Wenn said she has been juggling schoolwork in addition to assisting in the hospital’s main ICU. She’s getting her master’s degree in public health from the University of South Florida. On the day of the attacks, she had to submit a paper on “Long Shadows: Truth, Lies and History by Emma Paris.” The book covers the perception of catastrophic events and collective memory.
“It was very unreal sitting in a room frantically finishing this paper while the ground was vibrating from Israeli air strikes,” she said, “and I was waiting to hear which of my colleagues had been killed at the hospital.”
4 questions with Annaliese Stephenson-Wenn
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described these attacks as a “tragic mishap.” How do you respond to that?
“Statements from the Israeli prime minister calling the incident a mishap are blatant lies. The attack on the hospital was targeted at these particular workers, and it happened within minutes of each other. That type of attack is not an accident, nor are the attacks on other areas that have also been called accidents. For a military that says that they are the most advanced in the world, that’s a lot of accidents and that’s a lot of casualties that they are building up.”
The IPC, a U.N.-backed panel, confirmed famine in northern Gaza. Are you witnessing that on the ground?
“Absolutely, many of our patients, we can count their ribs. We can feel every notch in their spine as we turn them. The pediatric units have an overwhelming amount of patients that are not getting enough food. Their growth is stunted. They’re too small, and it’s because there’s no food available to feed them. The neonatal unit doesn’t have enough formula to give the tiny, tiny babies that are there. And these cause lifelong effects. These are children that are never going to be able to grow the way that they are supposed to, and it’s because of this famine.”
How do journalists help get the word out?
“We frequently have journalists that come into the hospital to document the types of patients that we have. We frequently have patients that are coming from the GHF [Gaza Humanitarian Foundation] sites with head wounds from sniper shots. We have sniper shots that target femoral arteries, groins, the spine to cause paralysis. We have injuries from the top of the shoulder that go down through the abdomen and exit through the back, which indicate that the patient was laying on the ground, most likely hiding when they were shot. And a lot of the times when we tell the world that this is happening, they don’t believe us. So we need the journalists to come in and document what’s happening to these patients and document what’s happening at these GHF sites.”
We’re hearing reports of Israel blocking more health care workers from entering Gaza. How is that impacting the health care system?
“The spots have become so limited on the medical delegations that even when they are allowing health care workers in, it’s such a limited amount that it’s almost negligible. And on top of that, they also block people sometimes the night before… and it causes chaos, because we’ve been waiting for this particular surgeon to come in and provide support and do all of these lifesaving surgeries, and now that surgeon has been blocked with no warning. A lot of times, there’s no explanation given, and it’s contributing to the crippling of the health care system in Gaza. There’s not enough specialists that can help with all of these patients that have these complex injuries — even if they’re able to initially stabilize a patient, they’re not able to monitor them once they’re in the hospital. And there’s not enough nurses that are able to take care of the patients. They’re working 24-hour shifts. They haven’t been paid in two years. They are working with no food. Continuing to block extra health care workers from entering Gaza is helping to lead to more patient deaths. Without these specialists, without these nurses, these patients are dying, and it’s completely preventable.
“On top of that, [there’s a] blockage of medical supplies. A lot of these patients are dying from simple things like lack of soap. If they survived the initial explosion, then we don’t have soap to clean their wounds consistently while they heal, and they end up with infections, and they die from sepsis. We don’t have gauze just to wrap their wounds and keep them covered, because there’s flies, there’s dirt, there’s germs. Some of these patients are staying out in tents outside the hospital because there’s no room for them inside the hospital. And we just can’t keep them clean enough to not get these infections and die.”
This interview has been edited for clarity.
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Hafsa Quraishi produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Michael Scotto. Quraishi also adapted it for the web.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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