Wednesday, February 4, 2009
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.
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.
Trip to Gaza Heartbreaking for Utah Doctor
Matthew D. LaPlante of The Salt Lake Tribune reports:
Humanitarian mission » Irfan Galaria traveled with 13 other doctors to treat wounded in recent conflict
The mother wrapped her arms around her 1-year-old daughter's body. The nurse held the child's head. And the doctor worked, stitch by stitch, to repair a laceration that stretched from the little girl's cheek to her lip.
There was no anesthetic to ease the child's pain.
"So this little girl, you know, she could feel it," said Irfan Galaria, a Salt Lake City plastic surgeon who returned Sunday from a 10-day humanitarian mission to Gaza. "Every time I stuck her with the needle she could feel it."
Galaria was among 14 doctors from the Islamic Medical Association of North America who traveled to Gaza in the wake of an Israeli military assault there that left more than 1,000 dead and several thousand more wounded, according to both Israeli and Palestinian casualty estimates. Although the two sides dispute the number of casualties that were civilians, Galaria said it was clear from his perspective at Gaza City's al-Shifa Hospital that noncombatants -- including children -- suffered greatly in the fighting.
And among the wounded he treated were many suffering from what appeared to be white phosphorus burns. U.S. manufacturers, among others, produce phosphorus shells for use in lighting up nighttime battlefields and creating smoke screens, but international law bans the use of the hot-burning shells in densely populated areas like Gaza.
It is Gaza's density -- the small stretch of land is similar in size and population to Philadelphia
-- that makes it a difficult place to conduct military operations without a large degree of collateral damage. "I was surprised and shocked to see the extent and the degree of civilian casualties," Galaria said.
Making matters far worse, he said, was the utter lack of medical supplies, everything from towels for surgeons to dry their hands after scrubbing to anesthetics for use in minor surgeries like the one Galaria performed on the young Gazan girl.
Galaria said the recent fighting aggravated a situation that was already dire. "They lack medical supplies, food, clothing -- anything that you can imagine," he said.
California lawyer Ahmed Kasem, who helped arrange transportation, lodging and served as a translator for the doctors, said he fears that the world has been given an incomplete picture about the situation in Gaza.
"It's heartbreaking," he said, "because from my personal vantage point, these people have no future. There are no jobs. There is nothing coming in or out. They've been locked up, isolated and forgotten."
Many of the doctors on the trip have agreed to look into further opportunities to return to Gaza to continue to care for those in need.
Iowa surgeon Rick Colwell said he is sadly certain that there will be plenty to do when the doctors return. "There was so much to do, you could stay there for years and never finish," Colwell told Sioux City's KPTH-TV, "but you do what you can."
Humanitarian mission » Irfan Galaria traveled with 13 other doctors to treat wounded in recent conflict
The mother wrapped her arms around her 1-year-old daughter's body. The nurse held the child's head. And the doctor worked, stitch by stitch, to repair a laceration that stretched from the little girl's cheek to her lip.
There was no anesthetic to ease the child's pain.
"So this little girl, you know, she could feel it," said Irfan Galaria, a Salt Lake City plastic surgeon who returned Sunday from a 10-day humanitarian mission to Gaza. "Every time I stuck her with the needle she could feel it."
Galaria was among 14 doctors from the Islamic Medical Association of North America who traveled to Gaza in the wake of an Israeli military assault there that left more than 1,000 dead and several thousand more wounded, according to both Israeli and Palestinian casualty estimates. Although the two sides dispute the number of casualties that were civilians, Galaria said it was clear from his perspective at Gaza City's al-Shifa Hospital that noncombatants -- including children -- suffered greatly in the fighting.
And among the wounded he treated were many suffering from what appeared to be white phosphorus burns. U.S. manufacturers, among others, produce phosphorus shells for use in lighting up nighttime battlefields and creating smoke screens, but international law bans the use of the hot-burning shells in densely populated areas like Gaza.
It is Gaza's density -- the small stretch of land is similar in size and population to Philadelphia
-- that makes it a difficult place to conduct military operations without a large degree of collateral damage. "I was surprised and shocked to see the extent and the degree of civilian casualties," Galaria said.
Making matters far worse, he said, was the utter lack of medical supplies, everything from towels for surgeons to dry their hands after scrubbing to anesthetics for use in minor surgeries like the one Galaria performed on the young Gazan girl.
Galaria said the recent fighting aggravated a situation that was already dire. "They lack medical supplies, food, clothing -- anything that you can imagine," he said.
California lawyer Ahmed Kasem, who helped arrange transportation, lodging and served as a translator for the doctors, said he fears that the world has been given an incomplete picture about the situation in Gaza.
"It's heartbreaking," he said, "because from my personal vantage point, these people have no future. There are no jobs. There is nothing coming in or out. They've been locked up, isolated and forgotten."
Many of the doctors on the trip have agreed to look into further opportunities to return to Gaza to continue to care for those in need.
Iowa surgeon Rick Colwell said he is sadly certain that there will be plenty to do when the doctors return. "There was so much to do, you could stay there for years and never finish," Colwell told Sioux City's KPTH-TV, "but you do what you can."
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