Gaza’s Al Shifa: A hospital on the brink | Featured Documentary

Gaza’s main hospital is overflowing with both the living and the dead. The morgues are at full capacity and the bodies spill to the street outside Al Shifa hospital.

Inside hundreds of seriously injured fill the hallways as the doctors decide which lives they should save. Men, women and children are among the wounded and doctors work under immense pressure knowing all services will soon grind to a halt when the backup generators stop working.

Israel’s complete siege on Gaza has meant no food, no water, no electricity and no fuel. As these deplete faster than the hospital can cope, Al Shifa is on the brink on catastrophe. While the hospital struggles to cope with the injured, other patients include 70 people on ventilators, 200 receiving dialysis and 118 babies in incubators. Without electricity, they will die.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), a medical charity called the escalation “abhorrent”.

“As Gaza loses power, hospitals lose power, putting newborns in incubators and elderly patients on oxygen at risk. Kidney dialysis stops, and X-rays can’t be taken. Without electricity, hospitals risk turning into morgues,” Fabrizio Carboni, the ICRC’s regional director for the Near and Middle East, said in a statement.

We filmed inside Al Shifa’s NICU where 118 are currently in incubators. Most of them are connected to mechanical ventilation. As the generators fall silent, the incubators will stop working and most of these babies will die. Dialysis patients also face the same fate.

The dialysis department at Al Shifa receives 1,800 patients who receive dialysis three times a week. We meet some of these patients whose life are not only threatened by the bombardment, but now vulnerable if unable to receive life saving treatment.

The hospitals of Gaza have also become shelter to many, and Al Shifa is no different. It is now home to hundreds of displaced people with nowhere to go. With basic services and necessities are no longer available for them we hear from several who had no choice but to come to the hospital for refuge.

With so many dead, the morgues are overwhelmed. Undertakers struggle to identify and bury the deceased. When the generators stop working, the morgues will no longer be able to function.

No one knows the reality of what is happening in Al Shifa better than the medics. And while they may be doctors or nurses, they are also residents of Gaza. We meet these medical teams who tell us about the daily horrors they have witnessed since Israel’s latest assault began.

Credits:
A film by Zainab Walji and Mays el Shobasy
Edited by Jameel Hodzic
Filmed by Media Town in Gaza

Thumbnail Image: Palestinian civil defense officers mourn over the body of one of their colleagues who arrived dead at the Shifa hospital, after Israeli airstrikes targeted a civil defense site in Gaza City, central Gaza Strip, early Monday, Oct. 16, 2023. (AP Photo/Abed Khaled)

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