A British NGO announced the establishment of a field hospital in the Gaza Strip to provide sorely needed medical services in the war-torn territory, and said it was now up and running and treating patients for injuries sustained as a result of the ongoing war, as well as various illnesses related to the humanitarian crisis that has developed.
Located close to the southern city of Rafah, the UK-Med organization began setting up and building the hospital earlier this month, and is already caring for some 200 patients a day, according to the charity’s CEO David Wightwick.
“The scale of the need is simply staggering,” Wightwick told the BBC.
“In my 25 years of humanitarian aid work, this is by far the most challenging situation I have seen,” Wightwick says on UK-Med’s website.
Trucks bringing the field-hospital’s assembly kit were initially held up at the Gaza border, according to a report by the BBC, and so the UK-Med team began building the hospital using timber from destroyed buildings and other materials sourced from the surrounding area and constructed the makeshift hospital in 10 days.
The field hospital kit sent out from Manchester arrived at the site last week to expand the initial facilities, and will increase capacity so that the medical center will be able to care for some 250 patients a day, as well as providing surgical capability, according to the announcement.
Not all the planned services are yet accessible, and parts of the facility are still being built, including an in-patients ward, laboratory, sterilization facility, laundry, and toilets, Wightwick told Sky News.
The hospital is already providing family medicine services, and has set up a minor emergency medicine unit which will gradually be developed into an emergency department as the hospital becomes fully operational, he added.
“We’ve also set up a number of clinics up to the Wadi Gaza enclave, from the south all the way up to the north,” said Wightwick.
“We’ve seen well over two thousands patients, many of them very serious surgical patients, multiple amputees, [we’re doing] a lot of life saving and life changing work.”
The hospital’s health teams are also seeing “many children with infectious water-borne diseases such as Hepatitis A.” according to Lucky Chikaura, a UK-Med water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) engineer.
“Our team is faced with incredibly difficult working conditions, providing around the clock surgery for the wounded, with a devastatingly high percentage being innocent children,” UK-Med said in a news update on its website.
According to an IDF statement in January there were eight field hospitals already up an running by the end of that month, as well as two floating hospital ships off the Gaza coast.
Gaza has been facing a mounting humanitarian crisis after almost six months of war, sparked by Hamas’s October 7 massacre across southern Israel when thousands of terrorists overran communities and bases, killing some 1,200 people, and taking 253 hostage.
The United Nations has warned for weeks that the healthcare system in Gaza is in collapse and that at least a quarter of the population is facing famine, with aid agencies reporting huge difficulties gaining access to the territory, particularly the north.
Donors have turned to deliveries by air or sea, but these are not viable alternatives to land deliveries, UN agencies say.