A British paramedic volunteering at a field hospital in Gaza has described the suffering as ‘unlike anything I’ve seen’ in frontline healthcare.
Sam Sears said a voluntary team with UK-Med is responding to starvation and the aftermath of mass casualty incidents involving civilians.
He spoke from the humanitarian medical charity’s tented facility in Al-Mawasi, a strip of land by the Mediterranean, a day after more than 100 aid agencies warned in a joint statement that ‘mass starvation is spreading’ across Gaza, with the UN-led humanitarian system in collapse.
Sears told Metro: ‘We are seeing lots of patients in the local area coming in with blast injuries, shrapnel wounds, gunshot wounds, poly trauma and we are also seeing a lot of malnourished, dehydrated patients.
‘Normally we see patients after a food distribution point, we tend to get a lot of patients with those wounds soon after they happen.
‘We are not sure of the why, where and when it happened, but they are coming in with gunshot wounds to all parts of the body and shrapnel from nearby explosions.’
Pictures of starving Palestinians, some of them babies, have emerged from Gaza in the past weeks as the situation worsens by the hour.
Accounts of the injuries from UK-Med volunteers align with separate reports of desperate civilians coming under fire from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) as they try to reach the few aid locations in the territory.
Israel has denied deliberately targeting civilians and has accused Hamas of looting aid so it can sell the produce and supply its war machine.
‘It’s unlike anything I’ve seen before,’ Sears said.
‘Especially like nothing I’ve seen in the UK, and I have worked in other areas like Sierra Leone for Ebola and Ukraine in the war but this here is completely different. It’s like times ten here.
‘We are struggling for food here at the moment, let alone national staff that are working with us who have had to manage this for the last 20 months.’
David Wightwick, the non-governmental organisation’s CEO, has described collecting food in Gaza as ‘one of the most dangerous activities you could wish to imagine’ and said that civilians are starving.
He gave the example of an eight-year-old girl with a gunshot wound to the head who could not be saved, despite the medics’ best efforts.
‘When we have a mass casualty incident, it’s where explosions happen nearby from a missile or something similar to that, and patients will arrive, three or four in the back in the car,’ Sears said.
‘We had one last week, a child who was dead on arrival along with his father, we believe, and countless patients severely critically injured, wounds that we had to treat very quickly.’
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The team has been working around the clock amid scarce supplies, including fuel, which is needed for the field hospital’s own provision.
Sears, who is on his first trip to Gaza, said: ‘We are seeing in our hospitals and our primary health care centre we have in the north, it’s very obvious we have got malnourishment in the community.
‘We are seeing pregnant mothers who are struggling to continue as they become more unwell, because obviously they are carrying as well, so that’s an issue. We can buy certain things from the market but it’s very scarce, it’s also costing quadruple or more than what it normally would.
‘A kilogram of sugar at the minute is costing $130, so it’s just extortionate.’
Sears, 44, from Northamptonshire, works for the East Midlands Ambulance Service but is one of hundreds of NHS medics who volunteer for the charity as emergency responders in crisis zones worldwide.
He said that he is part of a ‘very good’ team where there are regular debriefs as well as feedback after patients undergo surgery.
The field hospital, one of two operated by the charity in Gaza, is currently treating 500 people a day and incorporates an operating theatre for lifesaving surgical procedures.
The paramedic told Metro that he is hoping for a ceasefire to alleviate the humanitarian crisis.
‘The ceasefire is needed, not just a pause but a permanent end to the hostilities,’ he said. ‘The people in Gaza have suffered immensely, they have got nowhere to call home.
‘They are hungry, malnourished, the conflict needs to stop really.
‘The healthcare and aid needs to come in for the 2.1 million people who it’s needed for here.’
Israel is ‘evaluating’ a revised response from Hamas to a proposed ceasefire and hostage release deal, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said today.
In a post on X, the IDF said: ‘Terrorists fired a projectile that fell approx. 250 meters from an aid distribution site in Gaza.
‘This site in Rafah is open today and tens of thousands of weekly food packages were distributed.
‘Hamas and the other terrorist organizations will do anything to sabotage civilians from receiving aid.’
MORE: The pictures that show the scale of ‘mass starvation’ in Gaza
MORE: Aid worker’s desperate voice message from Gaza: ‘It’s a disaster here, we can’t breathe.’
MORE: Doctor’s heartbreaking decisions choosing which babies live or die in Gaza
