Listen to this articleListen to this article | 5 minsinfoAs I write these lines, I am receiving treatment at al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City for kidney disease. Actually, I don’t know whether what I am receiving can actually be termed “treatment” or if it is only an attempt to postpone the inevitable.Due to acute shortages of medicine and equipment in Gaza, doctors here make decisions based more on what is accessible than what is medically necessary. I am one such case. The necessary medicine and some of the tests I need are not available in Gaza right now.My doctor informed me today, after new tests, that my condition has worsened and I urgently need to be evacuated from Gaza. He will do a referral for me so I can be put on the list of the 22,000 Palestinians who are languishing in pain while waiting to leave so they can get urgently needed medical care abroad.My body, like this hospital I am in, is functioning at the bare minimum.Life was difficult before the war, but at least there existed a reliable healthcare system, albeit a shaky one. Whenever medicine and tests were unavailable in Gaza, I was able to go to the West Bank and get treatment there. In 2023, I went to a hospital in al-Khalil (Hebron), where the Palestinian Ministry of Health covered my treatment. I returned to Gaza only a few days before the war began.In the following two years, receiving any form of adequate medical care for my condition became impossible. My body – like the bodies of so many other chronically ill Palestinians – became another battlefield.Israel’s carpet bombing of Gaza destroyed hospitals one after the other. They were raided, burned, their equipment destroyed, doctors and nurses killed or forcibly disappeared, critical patients pushed out on the streets and left to die. Advertisement At the beginning of the war, the nephrology department at al-Shifa Hospital, where I had been receiving treatment for years, was badly damaged. The health authorities tried to rehabilitate it, but it was shelled again multiple times. Today, it is barely functioning and missing much of its equipment.In May 2024, Israel took over the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt and closed it. Essential medications vanished, including painkillers and antibiotics.The medications I need – methyldopa tablets and amlodipine tablets, which I must take twice daily – are nowhere to be found.In parallel, the Israeli army bombed water treatment plants and pipes and cut off the supply of clean water, forcing us to drink contaminated water from wells. That made my condition even wors …
