US surgeon in Gaza talks about the scale of wounds in Gaza: 'Something I have never dealt with'

A US vascular surgeon who left Gaza after a stint as a volunteer said on Thursday, April 25th, that nothing had prepared him for the scale of the wounds he had faced there.

Dozens of patients a day. Most of them are young. Most are facing complicated wounds caused by shrapnel. Most ended up with amputations, according to the surgeon.

"Vascular surgery is really a disease for older patients, and I would say I had never operated on anybody less than 16, and that was the majority of patients that we did this time around," Shariq Sayeed, from Atlanta, Georgia, told Reuters in Cairo.

"Most were patients 13, 14, 15, 16, and 17 years of age. Mostly shrapnel wounds and that was something I have never dealt with, that was something new."

In his stint at the European Hospital in Gaza, Sayeed said his team would deal with 40-60 patients daily. The vast majority were amputation cases.

Challenges in Gaza medical missions

"And unfortunately, there is a very high incidence of infection as well, so once you have an amputation that doesn't heal, you end up getting a higher amputation," he said.

Around 70 percent of the surgeries he performed were on wounds caused by shrapnel, the rest mostly from blast wounds and collapsing buildings.

Ismail Mehr, an anaesthesiologist from New York State who led the mission in Gaza, said the volunteer medics were "speechless at what [they] saw" when they arrived in April in southern Gaza.

Mehr is chairman of IMANA Medical Relief, a program focusing on disaster medical relief and healthcare support, and has treated over 2.5 million patients in 34 countries.

He has been to Gaza several times in the past but could not imagine what he saw this time: "Truly everywhere I saw was destruction in Khan Younis, not a single building standing."

Out of 36 hospitals that used to serve more than 2 million residents, just ten were somewhat functional by early April, according to the World Health Organization.

Health facilities lacked medical supplies, equipment, staff, and power supplies, Mehr said. His biggest fear is an expected Israeli assault into the southern city of Rafah, where half of Gaza's 2.3 million people reside.

"I hope and I pray that Rafah is not attacked," he said. "The health system will not be able to take care of that. It will be a complete catastrophe."