By Staff, Agencies

An Australian doctor who coordinated medical aid to Gaza has expressed horror at the “huge proportion of children being killed or maimed for life”.

Dr Natalie Thurtle, who helped oversee the response by Médecins Sans Frontières until last week, said it was “very confronting for colleagues trying to provide healthcare when it’s possible to be shot through the window of the hospital”.

Thurtle further stated that it was “impossible to set up a meaningful response to this catastrophe because of the ongoing military activity”.

“More and more patients are being created by the situation every day, so the overwhelm is absolutely massive and people don’t have any safe place to go,” she said.

Thurtle, an emergency physician usually based in Tasmania, was in East Al-Quds from early November until last week to help coordinate MSF’s medical operations in Gaza.

She was in daily contact with doctors in the besieged territory as they planned their healthcare response and she described an “incredibly chaotic environment” that was “extremely difficult to manage”.

“The few hospitals that remained in operation were full of patients and internally displaced people,” Thurtle said.

“And now, increasingly, it’s incredibly unsafe, as evidenced by the attack on Nasser hospital a couple of days ago, the siege and now the surrounding of al-Awda hospital by ‘Israeli’ forces,” she said.

Thurtle said between 150 and 200 patients were arriving at al-Aqsa hospital in central Gaza each day, but “about a third of those patients are dead on arrival, which is very hard because many of them are children”.

“Certainly, from speaking to colleagues and seeing the images that they’re seeing, the volume of children killed or mutilated in this conflict is very extreme,” she said.

In parallel, Thurtle mentioned that “Unfortunately, there’s a lot of misinformation around that, but that is certainly what we’re witnessing on the ground – that there’s a huge proportion of children being killed or maimed for life in this conflict.”

Her colleague Chris Hook, who is the MSF medical team leader in Gaza, said this week that doctors at Nasser hospital were “stepping over bodies of dead children to treat other children who will die anyway”.

Thurtle said MSF was speaking up because it felt it had a responsibility to explain what its staff were seeing and experiencing, given that “there’s a huge volume of commentary from people who are not directly witnessing what’s happening on the ground”.

 “I think we have been accused of loss of neutrality during this conflict, but it’s important to note that reporting what is being directly witnessed as healthcare workers does not represent a loss of neutrality,” she said.

Thurtle said MSF could not verify the overall death and injury toll in Gaza “but certainly with what we are seeing in terms of numbers arriving at facilities where we’re working those figures are not outlandish at all”.