Far From Violence, Gaza Wounded Find Care at Cairo Hospital

A Palestinian boy receives medical care at Nasser Institute hospital in Cairo, on December 3, 2023, after he was evacuated to Egypt following his injuries sustained amid fighting between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. (Photo by Khaled DESOUKI / AFP)
A Palestinian boy receives medical care at Nasser Institute hospital in Cairo, on December 3, 2023, after he was evacuated to Egypt following his injuries sustained amid fighting between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. (Photo by Khaled DESOUKI / AFP)
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Far From Violence, Gaza Wounded Find Care at Cairo Hospital

A Palestinian boy receives medical care at Nasser Institute hospital in Cairo, on December 3, 2023, after he was evacuated to Egypt following his injuries sustained amid fighting between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. (Photo by Khaled DESOUKI / AFP)
A Palestinian boy receives medical care at Nasser Institute hospital in Cairo, on December 3, 2023, after he was evacuated to Egypt following his injuries sustained amid fighting between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. (Photo by Khaled DESOUKI / AFP)

Ilham Majid was praying when bombs fell on her Gaza house, and her husband only found her hours later under the rubble, alive but seriously wounded.

She was one of the luckier ones -- 17 other family members, including two of her children, were killed in that fateful October 31 raid in the Jabalia refugee camp of northern Gaza, where Israel has been fighting Hamas militants following deadly attacks earlier that month.

Now, like several other Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, Majid is receiving medical treatment in Egypt.

"All of a sudden I felt the house crumbling. Three stories collapsed on top of me," the 42-year-old recalled from her hospital bed at Cairo's Nasser Hospital.

"I got shrapnel all over my body. My liver was hit, my leg, ribs and my jaw are all broken. I cannot walk."

Majid said her husband found her trapped under the rubble of the house by chance four-and-a-half hours later, thanks to one of her fingers that was sticking out.

"I almost could not breathe -- almost dead," she said, AFP reported.

Her 15-year-old daughter was killed in the bombardment, and 10 days later the body of her 17-year-old son was pulled from under the debris. It was already rotting.

Ever since the tragedy that ripped apart her family -- 50 relatives were staying at the house when it was hit -- Majid has been looking at pictures of her son on her cell phone.

Since early October, several Palestinians wounded in Israel's bombardment of the Gaza Strip, and some suffering various illnesses, have been authorized to leave the besieged territory and travel to Egypt for medical care.

More than 15,500 people, mostly civilians, have been killed in Gaza since fighting began on October 7, according to Gaza health ministry.

Israel unleashed an air and ground campaign against the densely-populated territory with the aim of destroying Hamas, after the militants broke through Gaza's militarized border into Israel.

The war on Gaza has devastated swathes of the coastal territory, levelled entire neighbourhoods and destroyed much of the infrastructure, including hospitals.

Even before fighting resumed on Friday after a week-long pause during which Hamas released hostages in exchange for prisoners held by Israel, Gaza's health system was on its knees with hospitals resembling a "horror movie", according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

Now it is "catastrophic", the UN agency has said.

Currently, only 18 of Gaza's 36 hospitals are even minimally to partially functional, with the three main hospitals in the north barely operative, Richard Peeperkorn, WHO's representative in the Palestinian territories, told reporters in Geneva via video-link from Gaza on Friday.

The United Nations says not a single hospital in northern Gaza can carry out surgeries after several were attacked by Israel, while those in the south are overwhelmed by the number of casualties they receive daily.

At Cairo's Nasser Hospital, patients such as Majid are trying to slowly regain their strength far away from the violence and chaos consuming Gaza.

Yussef, 13, lay in a bed staring into the distance, his face puffy.

Dried blood stained his right leg which was held together with metal rods.

"He was in a complete state of shock when I found him," said his older brother, under the rubble of their four-storey home in the Shati refugee camp.

In another hospital room further down the corridor, Lubna al-Shafei, 36, said she was being treated for a "neck wound".

"On October 23, our house in the centre of Gaza City was destroyed. My son was killed and my husband was wounded," she said.

Last week the Egyptian health ministry announced the launch of an initiative aimed at providing medical care for 1,000 children wounded in Gaza.

Already 28 premature babies who were trapped at Al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza's largest which was besieged and ultimately raided by Israeli forces, have been taken to Egypt.

The United Arab Emirates and Tunisia have also taken in Palestinians wounded in Gaza, namely children in need of medical care.

France and Italy have sent ships to Egypt to serve as hospitals for wounded civilians from Gaza.



Challenges of the Gaza Humanitarian Aid Pier Offer Lessons for the US Army

A truck carries humanitarian aid across Trident Pier, a temporary pier to deliver aid, off the Gaza Strip, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas, near the Gaza coast, May 19, 2024. US Army Central/Handout via REUTERS
A truck carries humanitarian aid across Trident Pier, a temporary pier to deliver aid, off the Gaza Strip, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas, near the Gaza coast, May 19, 2024. US Army Central/Handout via REUTERS
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Challenges of the Gaza Humanitarian Aid Pier Offer Lessons for the US Army

A truck carries humanitarian aid across Trident Pier, a temporary pier to deliver aid, off the Gaza Strip, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas, near the Gaza coast, May 19, 2024. US Army Central/Handout via REUTERS
A truck carries humanitarian aid across Trident Pier, a temporary pier to deliver aid, off the Gaza Strip, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas, near the Gaza coast, May 19, 2024. US Army Central/Handout via REUTERS

It was their most challenging mission.
US Army soldiers in the 7th Transportation Brigade had previously set up a pier during training and in exercises overseas but never had dealt with the wild combination of turbulent weather, security threats and sweeping personnel restrictions that surrounded the Gaza humanitarian aid project.
Designed as a temporary solution to get badly needed food and supplies to desperate Palestinians, the so-called Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore system, or JLOTS, faced a series of setbacks over the spring and summer. It managed to send more than 20 million tons of aid ashore for people in Gaza facing famine during the Israel-Hamas war.
Service members struggled with what Col. Sam Miller, who was commander during the project, called the biggest “organizational leadership challenge” he had ever experienced.
Speaking to The Associated Press after much of the unit returned home, Miller said the Army learned a number of lessons during the four-month mission. It began when President Joe Biden announced in his State of the Union speech in March that the pier would be built and lasted through July 17, when the Pentagon formally declared that the mission was over and the pier was being permanently dismantled.
The Army is reviewing the $230 million pier operation and what it learned from the experience. One of the takeaways, according to a senior Army official, is that the unit needs to train under more challenging conditions to be better prepared for bad weather and other security issues it faced. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because assessments of the pier project have not been publicly released.
In a report released this week, the inspector general for the US Agency for International Development said Biden ordered the pier's construction even as USAID staffers expressed concerns that it would be difficult and undercut a push to persuade Israel to open “more efficient” land crossings to get food into Gaza.
The Defense Department said the pier “achieved its goal of providing an additive means of delivering high volumes of humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza to help address the acute humanitarian crisis.” The US military knew from the outset “there would be challenges as part of this in this complex emergency,” the statement added.
The Biden administration had set a goal of the US sea route and pier providing food to feed 1.5 million people for 90 days. It fell short, bringing in enough to feed about 450,000 people for a month before shutting down, the USAID inspector general's report said.
The Defense Department’s watchdog also is doing an evaluation of the project.
Beefing up training Army soldiers often must conduct their exercises under difficult conditions designed to replicate war. Learning from the Gaza project — which was the first time the Army set up a pier in actual combat conditions — leaders say they need to find ways to make the training even more challenging.
One of the biggest difficulties of the Gaza pier mission was that no US troops could step ashore — a requirement set by Biden. Instead, US service members were scattered across a floating city of more than 20 ships and platforms miles offshore that had to have food, water, beds, medical care and communications.
Every day, said Miller, there were as many as 1,000 trips that troops and other personnel made from ship to boat to pier to port and back.
“We were moving personnel around the sea and up to the Trident pier on a constant basis,” Miller said. “And every day, there was probably about a thousand movements taking place, which is quite challenging, especially when you have sea conditions that you have to manage.”
Military leaders, he said, had to plan three or four days ahead to ensure they had everything they needed because the trip from the pier to their “safe haven” at Israel's port of Ashdod was about 30 nautical miles.
The trip over and back could take up to 12 hours, in part because the Army had to sail about 5 miles out to sea between Ashdod and the pier to stay a safe distance from shore as they passed Gaza City, Miller said.
Normally, Miller said, when the Army establishes a pier, the unit sets up a command onshore, making it much easier to store and access supplies and equipment or gather troops to lay out orders for the day.
Communication difficulties While his command headquarters was on the US military ship Roy P. Benavidez, Miller said he was constantly moving with his key aides to the various ships and the pier.
“I slept and ate on every platform out there,” he said.
The US Army official concurred that a lot of unexpected logistical issues came up that a pier operation may not usually include.
Because the ships had to use the Ashdod port and a number of civilian workers under terms of the mission, contracts had to be negotiated and written. Agreements had to be worked out so vessels could dock, and workers needed to be hired for tasks that troops couldn't do, including moving aid onto the shore.
Communications were a struggle.
“Some of our systems on the watercraft can be somewhat slower with bandwidth, and you’re not able to get up to the classified level,” Miller said.
He said he used a huge spreadsheet to keep track of all the ships and floating platforms, hundreds of personnel and the movement of millions of tons of aid from Cyprus to the Gaza shore.
When bad weather broke the pier apart, they had to set up ways to get the pieces moved to Ashdod and repaired. Over time, he said, they were able to hire more tugs to help move sections of the pier more quickly.
Some of the pier's biggest problems — including the initial reluctance of aid agencies to distribute supplies throughout Gaza and later safety concerns from the violence — may not apply in other operations where troops may be quickly setting up a pier to get military forces ashore for an assault or disaster response.
“There’s tons of training value and experience that every one of the soldiers, sailors and others got out of this,” Miller said. "There’s going to be other places in the world that may have similar things, but they won’t be as tough as the things that we just went through.”
When the time comes, he said, “we’re going to be much better at doing this type of thing.”
One bit of information could have given the military a better heads-up about the heavy seas that would routinely hammer the pier. Turns out, said the Army official, there was a Gaza surf club, and its headquarters was near where they built the pier.
That "may be an indicator that the waves there were big,” the official said.