Gaza Hospital Suffering: Nurse Reveals Avoidable Trauma
- BRATISLAVA, January 29 (IPS) - "I'd never encountered anything like it before.
- Jane, a nurse from a Western country, was part of a volunteer medical team that went into Gaza in early 2025 during a ceasefire that ran from January...
- Gaza's healthcare system had been devastated over the course of the Israeli offensive which had followed hamas's brutal attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023.
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BRATISLAVA, January 29 (IPS) – “I’d never encountered anything like it before. I had no idea that there could be a place that needed humanitarian aid and that a government entity wouldn’t allow physicians or health workers into [that place],” says Jane.*
Jane, a nurse from a Western country, was part of a volunteer medical team that went into Gaza in early 2025 during a ceasefire that ran from January 19 to March 18 last year.
Gaza’s healthcare system had been devastated over the course of the Israeli offensive which had followed hamas’s brutal attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023. According to UNICEF, 94 percent of hospitals have been damaged or destroyed.
Jane tells IPS her team had hoped that during the stop in fighting they would be able to help deliver vital treatment and services which were desperately needed by so many people in the country.
But she says that instead she and her colleagues, who set out for Gaza within weeks of the ceasefire coming into place, ran into seemingly arbitrary obstacles before they even set foot in the country.
Within hours of landing in Jordan, they found out that three physicians and one nurse in the team had been denied entry into Gaza. The following day there were more problems.
“We were at the border with many other ngos and all of us had been approved to go in [to Gaza]. But than towards the end of the day,they decided that they were going to close the border and not allow anybody through that day. So we had to make our way back to Jordan,” Jane tells IPS.
She says her team lost a week of time when they could have been helping people before they managed to get in.And when they did, she was shocked at what she found.
“It was when we drove into Gaza that it really hit me. You see these kinds of dystopian places in movies or read about them in novels… a van came to pick us up and drove us to our hospital and on this drive I could see nothing but demolished buildings, rubble everywhere. I had to look away a few times as there were skeletons of animals. I’m not sure if there were skeletons of people as I had to look away once I saw the skeletons of animals,” she says.
Things did not improve when she got to the hospital.
“We got to the hospital and at first, although it was different from what I’m used to, it seemed like a functioning hospital… until I started work the next day.”
She describes the hospital, which is one of the largest in gaza, as lacking even the moast basic resources. “they didn’t have paper, they didn’t have gloves, they didn’t have hand sanitiser,” Jane says.
Life-saving equipment such as ventilators for patients struggling to breathe was unavailable, forcing physicians to perform emergency intubations in certain specific cases.
Worst of all though, even when help could have been easily administered to relieve suffering, seemingly arbitrary decisions meant it was not.
“I had a patient - a little girl who had an infection that caused three out of four of her limbs to become gangrenous. All she needed to treat it was a simple medication. But, of course, we weren’t allowed to bring medications in – if [the authorities] found [those medicines on us], they could have either thrown them away or just entirely denied us access in.
“This little girl had been in this hospital for at least more than a month – she’d been waiting for a medical evacuation to Jordan, but israel continued to deny her medical evacuation. At the time I was there, she was supposed to be evacuated, but they denied it – twice while I was there.
Gaza’s hospitals are facing catastrophic conditions, with a volunteer nurse describing the suffering as “unfathomable but avoidable.” Despite readily available aid, restrictions on access are exacerbating the crisis.
“We have hundreds of truckloads of lifesaving assistance ready outside Gaza. The supplies exist. What we need is more access,” Ricardo Pires, Dialog Manager, Division of Global communications and Advocacy at UNICEF, told IPS.
Concerns center on restrictions placed on medical supplies deemed “dual use,” but also encompass essential items like antibiotics, painkillers, and specialized baby food. “It is absolutely heartbreaking and mind-blowing and tragic that people in Gaza are still suffering from completely avoidable misery and harm,” added Zarifi, noting the presence of full warehouses of necessary supplies.
The future remains uncertain as Israel recently announced plans to ban 37 NGOs from operating in Gaza, a move criticized by rights groups for further hindering aid delivery. The Guardian reports on the potentially catastrophic consequences of this ban.
One humanitarian worker, Jane, expressed pessimism about near-term improvements. “This has gone on for almost two and a half years and we still don’t have [political] leaders who will stop sending arms to israel,who will call for a ceasefire when a ceasefire was needed,and then who would actually make sure that the terms of the ceasefire are being are being honoured,because as we’ve seen recently,[Isreal is] continuing to drop bombs. But more than that, you can’t just create a ceasefire, then still not allow aid in. So, it’s hard to have hope for the future for Gaza.”
*Jane’s name and country of origin have been excluded from this feature for her safety.
IPS UN Bureau Report
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