Doctor says al-Shifa Hospital has been repeatedly attacked
Dr Aslam Akhtar, an emergency doctor who was volunteering at al-Shifa Hospital until last week, says he is not surprised that the journalists’ tent outside the hospital was attacked, since he has witnessed “indiscriminate killing” while he was there.
“Al-Shifa Hospital is the largest hospital in Palestine, but it has been invaded twice and burned down by the Israeli military,” Akhtar told Al Jazeera.
“There are many tents outside the hospital, as well, that are used as an ER [emergency room]. But the actual 800-bed hospital has been burned down, and it’s totally incapable of being used right now,” said Akhtar, who returned to Los Angeles from Gaza City two days ago.
He added that the patients he had seen there are now severely malnourished.
“Every patient that I saw there, whether it was a trauma patient or a medical patient, is severely malnourished.”
When he hugged his colleagues after returning to Gaza, he wanted to cry, he said, “because I’d feel how much weight they’ve lost”.
“I would feel the skin and bones of their back, because even the doctors, the nurses, even the chair of the emergency department, had lost so much weight due to the current man-made famine there.”