Gaza Strip. The Italian doctor in the ward in Khan Younis: io, forced to amputate
Dr. Ley's dramatic testimony: «We treat wounds from shrapnel and burns caused by explosions». Children are the first victims, with terrible wounds
by Nello Scavo
On the roof of the hospital they carefully unfurled a six by six meter flag: there is the symbol of the International Red Cross. «Impossible that planes, drones and satellites don't see it", says the doctor on the phone Paul Ley, that a Gaza he must mend the broken bones of civilians who often have to say one thing: «We have to amputate». And while he tells us about it, between network interruptions and trips to the operating room, from the phone we distinctly hear one of those close-ups that make you swear. «This didn't fall on us – exclaims the Italian doctor –, a few days ago a colleague of mine was hit by glass splinters".
From a French family but raised in the Varese area, Ley did nothing but stay at war. First with the Comboni missionaries, There is always a more unhappy and more ignored victim 14 years with Gino Strada in Emergency hospitals, and from 2014 with the International Committee of the Red Cross. Low vocal timbre, and the reassuring calm of the doctor you want to meet when you get into serious trouble, It will take us three days to complete the chat from the epicenter of the conflict.
Nothing is going as it should. The escape from al-Shifa hospital is still a race not to die. The ambulances are down, the humanitarian corridors a mirage, and there are those who move by letting themselves be towed by an ox that died of hunger and fear (see photo below), like the family who showed up at the European Hospital in Khan Yunis, in the south he returned to the bombers' sights, with a child operated on in the North, but that we can no longer stay in the North. Wrapped in a shroud, who seemed lifeless, the boy will be saved. But this was not how it was supposed to be evacuated.
«Or like that man who came to us with only one leg. He had recently been amputated but could not stay in al-Shifa, and came on foot, covering kilometers in those conditions", Ley says.
In the ward it is hell told in a low voice. A tri-amputee girl, the limbs of an adult severed and thrown into the special waste bin, or that mother to whom it wasn't so difficult to tell that after the anesthesia she would wake up without her legs anymore. The difficult thing was listening to his response: «They bombed our house – he explained to the doctor –. My husband and all my children died. I'm the only one left. Whole or in pieces, I am already a dead person".
The images that Paul Ley sends us make us sleepy. A little girl was hit by a splinter the size of an axe: the nose is no longer there, the right eye is stitched up. It will never reopen again. How many has this front-line surgeon seen. «But never like this time – confess -. From Africa to Afghanistan I don't even know how many wars I've been in, but something like this, with many dead and injured children, May".
The Gaza Strip is a mass of buildings «that is the distance between a legitimate military objective and one to be spared, when it's good it's 150 meters". Which means nothing when several hundredweight bombs fall. «Most of our patients are burn victims, but above all the 40% they are boys and children below the 15 years, none of them can be considered of fighting age", Ley insists, clearing away the suspicions of those who say that Hamas militiamen mostly end up on the operating table.
Even before the x-ray report arrives, the doctor already knows how things went: «We see wounds from shrapnel and burns caused by the explosions. Then there are the "blast" lesions, the shock wave that causes burns and especially trauma to the chest with pulmonary and often cerebral repercussions".
How he can handle the pressure while deadly lightning rains down around him is impossible to explain. However, it happens that it is the patients who break the litany of torment. «A Palestinian woman wants us to call her “Wonder Woman”», Ley says while for just an instant you realize that a smile is breaking out on that face of someone who has seen too much: «She told us that the war made her discover that she had superpowers. She was thrown from the ground to the second floor, to fall back to the ground again". Alive and with broken bones. «In an instant – the lady repeats to play down – I went to say hello to my neighbor on the second floor and came back down».
But in war there is never a happy ending. And those who go to war go there to mend bodies, he knows that healing doesn't mean staying alive. Before closing with the last call of the evening, we ask Paul Ley how the little girl whose sight is at risk is doing. The doctor says he will be fine, but she understood that her life will not be as she would have liked. So he cries, more than the pain. «What you see in the photo – says Ley – is not a hemorrhage. They are his tears, and I'm blood red".
