Cape Town, January 5 (RHC)-- South African health workers are drawing attention to the trauma and crisis in Gaza's medical system, which has been severely impacted by the Israeli offensive. The largest children's hospital in Sub Saharan Africa is where doctors and medical workers chose to highlight the trauma that Gaza's medical system is facing as a direct result of a hell-bent Israeli offensive.
Unlike this hospital where children's lives are saved each day, in Gaza, hospitals have become places of Israeli terror where humans are killed. After Gaza's Kamal Adwan hospital became the latest victim of the Israeli onslaught, healthcare workers here are demanding stronger international intervention to halt the regime's deadly campaign.
Nazreena Hassim, a South African physiotherapist, said: "Primarily as a healthcare worker, our main focus in life is care. We want to care about our patients. We want to care about the people around us, and we can only do that when we actually have equipment and facilities.
With two already out of service, Kamal Adwan Hospital remains the only hospital to treat thousands of daily wounded people as it remains under constant Israeli bombings.
Another South African doctor said: "Trying to do what's really, really, really difficult work in an environment where I don't have access to what I need and could be bombed at any moment, is actually inconceivable to me."
"Considering what's happening in the hospitals is actually barbaric, and that definitely shows us that's an infringement of any human rights, a basic necessity, and it's absolutely cruel, and also it just means that certain lives matter more than others."
The targeting of hospitals and continued detention of top medical figures, such as Dr Hussam Abu Safia, the director of the Kamal Adwan hospital, at Israeli concentration camps highlights the chilling reality for those whose purpose in life is to heal.
Physiotehrapist Nazreena Hassim went on to say: "He is a hero. I mean, if you look at him the way he directed the hospital and led everything in that hospital from the top, was absolutely admirable. I don't think as South Africans or as any other healthcare workers in the world who would be able to do what the Palestinians do. Their resilience is on another level."
"The heart, while being the powerhouse of human existence, is also the seat of emotion and pain. And so as Gaza's hospitals bleed South African medical practitioners feel a sense of loss as the heartbeat of a vital component of Palestinian survival fades."
