'Mercy' flights provide critically wounded and sick Palestinians a chance to survive
For 56 critically ill and wounded Gazans, the road to accessing crucial medical care started Tuesday on a military airfield in Egypt’s northern Sinai.
EL-ARISH, Egypt — For 56 critically ill and wounded Gazans, the road to crucial medical care started Tuesday on a military airfield in Egypt’s northern Sinai. This is where a plane was parked, awaiting patients driven in on ambulances from area hospitals or from inside Gaza.
Such "mercy" flights are made possible by countries such as the United Arab Emirates, where commercial planes are retrofitted with stretchers and beds to ferry patients on a four-hour trip from Egypt to Abu Dhabi to receive medical care. Tuesday’s flight was the UAE’s eleventh humanitarian airlift since the Israel-Hamas war began with the Oct. 7 attacks.
The patients on Tuesday’s flight were mainly children with complex fractures and head injuries. A few have chronic illnesses that have been left untreated since the supply of medicine into Gaza slowed to a trickle after the start of the war. The patients are tended to by a team of doctors and nurses who are on the flight with them.
“I remember the first girl that we evacuated in the first plane,” said Dr. Maha Barakat, the UAE's assistant minister of foreign affairs for health. “She had complex fractures and many broken bones. And her mother told us that for the first time in two months, she smiled when we were able to give her painkillers that relieved her of her pain.”
Gaza’s crumbling infrastructure and hospital system means that there are few places that the sick and injured, now at nearly 66,000, can access care. More than 26,900 people have been killed in Gaza since the war started, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. There have been 645 attacks on the health system in Palestinian territories, as of mid-January, according to the World Health Organization.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/mercy-flights-wounded-palestinians-egypt-rcna136640
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