Gaza: MOH opens medical clinic in Al Jundy

Gaza: MOH opens medical clinic in Al Jundy

The Gaza Ministry of Health today established a medical tent in Al Jundy, the Square of the Unknown Soldier in Gaza City, to provide primary care to local hunger-strikers maintaining a sit-in there.

Dr Hussein Shomar, of El Shifa hospital’s surgical department, told me that the clinic provides 24 hour care, with three shifts a day consisting of one doctor and two nurses. There is also an ambulance and driver to transport patients to El Shifa hospital as necessary.

The clinic had already seen 60 patients by early evening, three of whom had been transferred to El Shifa, two suffering from hypertension, and one from convulsions. The three were all hunger-strikers, and one was a woman.

Dr Shomar said he was not happy about the health of the Gaza hunger-strikers as many of them are ex-prisoners with already-compromised health, and several are old people. He said their health will deteriorate with every day that the hunger-strike goes on, so it is his sincere hope that Israel will meet the demands of the prisoners, which are also the demands of international law for the treatment of prisoners.

He added that he is even more afraid for the health of the two longest-striking prisoners in Israeli jails, Bilal Thiab and Thaer Halahleh, who have been slipping in and out of comas for the last few days, and are on the verge of death.

“They are dying while the world does nothing,” he said. “Everything we learned in medical school, everything we know from the textbooks, from experience, teaches us that they cannot recover from this, that their organs are irreparably damaged, and they are dying a slow death.”

Dr Shomar said that even Israeli doctors are demanding their immediate release, but prison authorities are turning a deaf ear.

Gaza may be the largest open-air prison in the world, but unlike Israeli prisons, at least its doctors still act in accordance with medical ethics, and ‘first, do no harm.’

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