Healthcare Crisis: The Raid of Rafah

3 min readMay 20, 2024

By: Kyle Lee and Renesh Gudipati

At the end of April, Israeli forces launched a ground offensive on the Palestinian city of Rafah, located in the Gaza strip, asserting that the location harbors outposts for the terrorist group Hamas [1]. This initiative, however, has put millions of civilians in extreme danger. Approximately 1.4 million Palestinians, constituting over half of Gaza’s population, are densely packed into this region. Many of them were displaced from their homes elsewhere in the territory by Israel’s offensive and now confront the prospect of yet another upheaval or the peril of a fresh onslaught. Aside from the direct hazards inflicted by the constant bombings, the Israeli attack has put enormous stress on Palestine’s existing support infrastructures [1].

The endless war and attacks against Rafah and nearing areas has caused extreme turmoil in their healthcare systems. Some of the many problems include a lack of healthcare professionals and equipment, inability to move for both providers and patients, and many hospital closures. The border closures around Rafah on May 7th exacerbated these problems and has led to hospitals being overworked and undersupplied; the severely wounded are not able to receive the help they need and innocent lives are being taken helplessly.

There are many doctors who expressed that they feel trapped in Rafah, due to fear that if they leave, a new mission will not be able to come into the city to continue patient care. Not only do doctors have to take care of their patients physically, but they have to provide a tremendous amount of emotional and mental support. Patients ask their doctors where they can go because hospitals such as Al Shifa and Nasser have been left in ruins. “The local medical staff have avoided telling the patients that our team may have to evacuate before the next set of aid workers can arrive, for fear it would cause a massive panic.” In such a drastic situation, doctors are forced to confront dangerous conditions if they wish to continue treating their vulnerable patients [2]. There have been reports of hospitals being invaded and doctors, patients, and staff have been killed, because Israel has deemed some hospitals as Hamas bases [3].

Doctors are not tied down to only Rafah, but they have minimal resources to work with. Many major hospitals have been destroyed or shut down due to evacuations from urgent security concerns [4]. The medical sites that still operate are small and lack the facilities to serve the scale and severity of this emergency situation [4]. While heroic efforts are being made to expand the capabilities of these stations, the ongoing assault and lack of consistent resource security makes this hope a volatile one. Within hospitals, the tools medical professionals have access to are extremely meager. “Doctors complain they have to perform surgery, including amputations, with no anesthetics or pain killer.” The conditions of patients and dwindling supplies have left doctors with no choice but to “prioritize patient lives. Regrettably, this term refers to deciding whom to stop treating and let die in order to divert resources to those with a better chance of surviving.” In addition to a lack of medical supplies, there is shortage of fuel which is necessary to pump water, turn on lights, and conduct other mechanical procedures at the hospitals [5].

Undoubtedly, the situation in Rafah is horrific. Doctors and healthcare staff are doing all that they can to manage the tremendous amount of patients. Unfortunately resources have been scarce and if supplies are not brought in soon, casualties from otherwise treatable conditions will only continue to rise. As of now doctors have been able to manage the panic, but if it comes to the point where doctors have to evacuate, patients may face the possibility of being left to die.

Kyle is a third-year Neuroscience major at UCLA. Renesh is a third-year Computational and Systems Biology major at UCLA. Kyle and Renesh are both THINQ 2023–2024 clinical fellows.

Sources:

Healthcare Crisis: The Raid of Rafah

Written by THINQ at UCLA

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