Mercy in a War Zone

Justin Head of the Hornell Evening Tribune reports:

Hornell, N.Y. - It’s a trip he will never forget.

When St. James Mercy Hospital’s Dr. Ismail Mehr headed out to Gaza for the third humanitarian relief effort of his life, he thought he knew how bad conditions were going to be in the war ravaged region. But he soon found out nothing could have prepared him for the conditions he would experience.

“The first thing that we saw was the destruction and the tank tracks through fields, houses blown up ... One vivid thing that I caught was a children’s playground that had been torn a part because the tanks had driven through it. There was a zoo in Gaza and the animals had been killed. We got a sense of war. I’ve never been to battle grounds and I got to see what it looked like,” said Mehr.

Mehr, an anesthesiologist at St. James, was the leader of a 10-day medical mission receiving national recognition. The trip was sponsored by the Islamic Medical Association of North America and has had stories about it done in the Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune.

“We were the only Americans to go to Gaza and we will probably be the only ones to go as far as a relief team that is strictly under the charter of an American charitable organization. The other Americans there were journalists or people who worked for the United Nations,” said Mehr. He crossed the border with 36 South Africans.

“I think that is a shame that we pride ourselves in the United States on wanting to help others and in the end we were the only ones that went, from the Islamic Medical Association,” said Mehr.
The trip almost became impossible as Mehr and his team were hassled at the Egyptian border where they crossed as they ventured to the El Shifa Hospital in Gaza city.

Gaza has a large, military-patrolled wall erected around the entire densely populated urban city. No one is allowed to travel in or out. Israel and the Hamas government have battled each other for years, causing sporadic and sometimes long periods of devastating violence.

On the first day of his trip Mehr had to go to the U.S. Embassy in Cairo to sign a waiver to be allowed to cross into Gaza because the borders to Gaza are completely sealed from anyone going in or anyone coming out. Representatives at the embassy told the team that they would be offered no help if any fighting broke out. Mehr stayed in a hotel that was running on generators and frequently heard bombings.

“The guts and the trauma and the severed limbs and you know the gory stuff everyone from the media and people when I return to the states always want to know ‘What did you see? Was it bad?,’ had sort of passed. Either people had already died or been treated by local doctors. We missed that by a couple of days. But what we did see was a lot of wounds, infections, amputations, or people that needed to be amputated, shrapnel wounds and what not,” said Mehr.

He said the media is biased and fails to report how the area has been crippled by an embargo that is slowly killing the people there.

“We saw war crimes there, we saw kids burnt with white phosphorous, on the same side we haven’t seen the suicide bombings and what happens over in Israel because we haven’t been over there, but I think both sides are wrong,” said Mehr.

During his trip he took photos of horrific scenes, dead children covered with rubble, animals that had been executed, gaping wounds from shrapnel that civilians were hit with, bombed buildings and other images that paint a horrific picture of the conditions there.

“Most of my procedures were cancer-related surgerys and most of them were on children ... The local doctors had these patients with cancer and they didn’t know how to treat it because they didn’t have chemotherapy. Their tumors had grown so large they just didn’t have the skills or instruments to use them.” said Mehr.

He talked about this as he discussed the case of a 5-year-old child that had a kidney tumor about the size of a watermelon that he had been living with for several months. Doctors in Gaza have no way to obtain new medical materials or fix broken equipment in the hospitals so they use dated instruments or are unable to treated certain ailments entirely.

“They have to improvise and make due. There are only two CT scanners for a population for 1.5 million. If you look at Rochester they service a population of about a million and they have probably about 50 scanners running all the time ... People need to realize there is a humanitarian side to it and the people that are hurting are the civilians and the public. It’s not the politicians and we need to stress that with our politicians and the effects of the embargo,” said Mehr.

Mehr plans on going back to Gaza in the future if it is possible.