DUBAI: Indonesian medics volunteering at the Kamal Adwan Hospital in north Gaza said they were forced by Israeli troops to leave the area on Friday, days after arriving with emergency assistance.
Like the rest of Gaza’s north, the Kamal Adwan Hospital has been cut from any supplies since early October, enduring multiple Israeli strikes and a siege and running out of fuel, among other essentials.
Five volunteers from the Indonesian nongovernmental organization Medical Emergency Rescue Committee, or MER-C, arrived in the facility on Dec. 1 and were the first emergency medical team to reach it in 60 days.
They were forced to leave on Friday morning following two warnings, Dr. Faradina Sulistiyani, a surgeon from the MER-C, said in a video clip upon arrival in Gaza City.
“We walked from Kamal Adwan until Salah Al-Din Street,” she said. “They are bombing the hospital now.”
Most of the hospital’s doctors have been detained by Israeli soldiers in raids since late October.
The Indonesian team, comprising Sulistiyani, another surgeon, an obstetrician, and two nurses, were the only ones able to perform surgeries in the past days, the hospital’s director, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, said in a statement after their departure.
“No surgeons are left,” he said, as he reported scores of casualties from Friday’s attacks.
“Medical supplies are running out, and there are hundreds of victims.”
From the Kamal Adwan Hospital, the Indonesian team walked to the nearby Indonesia Hospital — a facility that was funded and opened by MER-C in 2016. Heavily damaged by Israeli strikes last year, the hospital partly reopened in June. It has been targeted again since October.
Video footage shared by MER-C shows the Indonesian medics sheltering in the facility, amid strikes hitting the building.
“We have evacuated from the Kamal Adwan Hospital, now at Indonesia Hospital. God willing, we’ll walk to Salah Al-Din,” one of the volunteers said in the clip. “Dr. Hussam and other local medical staff remained in Kamal Adwan.”
When they reached Salah Al-Din Road, the main highway of the Gaza Strip, they were picked up by a Palestine Red Crescent Society ambulance.
“There were still people walking some 300 meters behind us,” Kamal Putra Pratama, a nurse from the team, said in a video from the car. “Hopefully the people who were in Kamal Adwan, the sick people, can be evacuated.”
One of the last functioning health centers in north Gaza, the Kamal Adwan Hospital has been hit multiple times since the start of Israel’s war on the Palestinian enclave in October last year.
The hospital’s intensive care unit director Ahmad Al-Kahlut was killed in an air strike late last month.
The Israeli military has killed at least 44,600 people and injured more than 105,000. The real death toll is believed to be much higher, with estimates published by medical journal The Lancet indicating that, as of July, it could be more than 186,000.
