YouTube Video (cJgLVtB600E)
The bombing campaign of the past two weeks has caused massive damage to the last few functioning hospitals in besieged eastern Aleppo, Syria. Inside, medical staff are faced with unimaginable choices.
"We are under siege in this place so we have to deal with all the patients that we receive. We are seeing severe brain injuries that we simply cannot manage.
Whatever you try to do, it won’t help. You wait for five minutes while they die, without being able to do anything to save them.
There are a lot of wounded people because the bombs are hitting busy areas – crowded streets, bread queues, or the queues where aid is being distributed. These kinds of places are being hit a lot.
As a result, we are receiving large numbers of wounded people. At times all the hospitals in eastern Aleppo are full. Intensive care units and inpatient wards are all crowded. Once or twice a day, you have to empty the wards so as to make space for new patients.
We do whatever we can. At times we have had to carry out as many as 20 to 30 surgeries in one day in one hospital. Hospitals are working at full power. We were supposed to limit our use of fuel, consumables and drugs during the siege, but due to the intensified bombing – for many days it has been very heavy – we haven’t been able to limit our use of fuel or anything else.
I think that with less work and less use of the supplies we have, we can hold out for three months. But if the bombing continues at this intensity, I think we won’t be able to carry on for more than a month or six weeks."
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