Occupied Jerusalem Doctors and aid agencies are trying to evacuate more wounded Palestinians for life-saving medical treatment in Occupied east Jerusalem, 1948 areas and Jordan.
More than 9,500 Palestinians were wounded during Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza, according to Gaza health officials.
Ninety of some of the most serious cases have been evacuated through the Erez border crossing since the conflict began, according to Guy Inbar, spokesman for COGAT which is part of the Israeli defence ministry.
He said the wounded had been sent to Israel and Jordan from an Israeli field hospital at Erez.
Medics and the Red Crescent told AFP that two patients were sent to Nazareth in the 1948 areas and dozens of others to three hospitals in Occupied East Jerusalem.
Four-year-old Shayma Al Masri has been a patient at St Joseph’s in Occupied East Jerusalem for two weeks.
She is still exhausted and still in pain.
Her spleen, kidneys, stomach and intestines have all been damaged by shrapnel that pierced her small chest and tore through her body, before exiting from her side.
Her only companion from Gaza is her aunt. But she knows where her dead family are.
“My mother, brother and sister went up to the sun, they will return to me when the clouds clear,” she says.
Bound to her bed by a network of tubes nourishing and sustaining her, she was seriously wounded in an Israeli missile attack on Beit Hanun, north of Gaza City.
The family were hit as they fled in terror from an attack on their neighbourhood during which their home was bombed. Her mother Sahar, 17-year-old sister Asil and brother Mohammad, 15, were killed instantly.
Her father is being treated separately at hospital in Gaza.
She cries out, calling for him.
“We were bombarded from the air, sea and land,” says her aunt Samah. “Everything turned into destruction. We ran away to the school, they bombed the school.”
Shayma’s room is full of Palestinians from east Jerusalem who have come to show their solidarity with Gaza by visiting the wounded.
During the feast of Eid al-Fitr which ended the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, they bought food, sweets and new clothes, as well as dolls and games for the children.
“We are trying to get more cases from Gaza to ease the pressure there,” says Dr Maher Deeb, head of St Joesph’s hospital.
His hospital is treating 25 Gazans evacuated by aid agencies in coordination with Israel, which has also set up a medical unit at Erez.
“We’re working round the clock. Fifty percent of the cases are critical. Even the stable cases are complicated and need long-term treatment,” Deeb tells AFP.
