Naperville Radiologist Shocked by Conditions in Gaza

Noreen S. Ahmed-Ullah of the Chicago Tribune reports:

February 20, 2009

As a radiologist in the western suburbs, Dr. Imran Qureshi won't do procedures such as angiograms without the latest technology, monitoring devices and sterile equipment. But those medical standards seemed like luxuries when he spent a week in war-torn Gaza late last month.

The Naperville resident was part of a medical relief team made up of Muslim physicians and surgeons from across the U.S. who traveled to Gaza on the heels of a three-week Israeli offensive that Israel said was meant to halt rocket attacks by Hamas. About 1,300 Palestinians and 13 Israelis were killed in the conflict.

Qureshi, who is Palestinian but had never been to the Middle East, spent seven days in Gaza with 10 other U.S. doctors organized by the Lombard-based Islamic Medical Association of North America.

"It was a broken-down medical care system," said Qureshi, 35, who practices at Rush-Copley Medical Center in Aurora. "Compared to what we have here, it was very primitive."

When they crossed from Egypt into Gaza, a cease-fire between Israel and the ruling Hamas party had been in place for just five days. Buildings were scarred with bullet holes and missing walls, and mosques had lost their minarets. Inside Gaza's largest hospital, Al-Shifa, doctors were putting in 20-hour days treating people injured during airstrikes and fighting, or lacking proper care for long-term ailments.

The visiting doctors reset bones, treated people for gunshot wounds and changed dressings for burn patients, sometimes seeing burns all the way to the bones—a possible sign of white phosphorous, Qureshi said.

The physicians did other work that was not directly related to the latest conflict. They did reconstructive surgery, removed kidney tumors, surgically created access portals for dialysis patients—complex procedures that few, if any, physicians in Gaza were able to perform, Qureshi said.

He put his interventional radiology skills to use, demonstrating procedures for local doctors and working on patients.

Qureshi was shocked by the lack of medical resources created by years of fighting and border closings. "The system has not evolved," he said. "There's been no influx or out-flux of doctors to train in these types of procedures."

Qureshi brought with him three boxes with $75,000 worth of expired catheters, needles and surgical equipment, and free samples of painkillers and antibiotics given to him by sales representatives for medical supply companies.

Qureshi said most of the Palestinians he met showed no anger toward Israel or Hamas in the fighting's aftermath. The only person he met who expressed frustration was the head of an orphanage. A 17-year-old boy who lived there had been killed in an airstrike while walking from school, and younger kids who looked up to him were having nightmares and wetting their beds, the man told Qureshi.

The man also had lost his brother-in-law, "and he was venting a bit," Qureshi recalled. "He said, 'This is the life we live. We had 150 kids in the orphanage, and we were building a school for them. But we now have 2,000 orphans, and we can't build the school.' "

nahmed@tribune.com

**ERRORS: Please note that Dr. Qureshi is not Palestinian, he is an American and has no Palestinian heritarge. He has also frequently visited the Middle East, having been to Kuwait, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and other nations.