As the gruelling fuel crisis continues, so does the strain on local public transport services, including ambulances, across the Gaza Strip. Only about 15% of these services are operating, with up to 90% of private cars off the roads and all of Gaza’s 450 fuel stations closed.
For ambulance drivers, the situation is particularly fraught, as demands for their services have soared over the past two months because of a lack of alternative transport to hospitals. The city of Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, has 15 ambulances serving a population of more than 175 000 people.
At the local headquarters of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS), ambulance drivers say the fuel crisis is making their work ”difficult and miserable”. Fawzi Abdul Hadi, head of the Rafah PRCS ambulance service, says: ”We are managing to keep our ambulances on the roads, but we’ve been forced to limit our movements and now we can respond only to urgent cases.”
The Rafah PRCS ambulance drivers normally responded to between 250 and 300 cases a month in and around Rafah. But Fawzi Hadi says they are now receiving up to 350 calls. ”We can’t respond to all the calls because overall demand has increased so much. As well as emergencies, we regularly transfer patients between local hospitals — and now we can operate less than half of the transfers, even though we sometimes ask transfer patients to share the ambulances to save fuel.”
The Rafah PRCS ambulance drivers say locals regularly resort to using donkeys and carts to access hospitals. ”Under these current conditions, it is very difficult for Gazans to travel anywhere at all,” says Fawzi Hadi.
Collective punishment of a civilian population is illegal under international human rights and humanitarian law, but Israel has been imposing a crippling siege on the Gaza Strip for almost two years. In addition to denying 1,5-million civilians their basic rights to freedom of movement, the siege has devastated the Gazan economy and infrastructure, and severely undermines the delivery of all essential services.
Asad Daoud is an ambulance driver at the Emirates Hospital in Rafah. The hospital has a large obstetrics unit and receives about 1 800 patients a month, but has only one ambulance. Ten days ago the ambulance ran out of fuel and the service had to be temporarily suspended.
”The situation is miserable,” says Asad. ”We used to be able to deliver a good standard of service to our patients. But these conditions are extremely difficult because we do not have sufficient fuel in Gaza. I regularly transfer patients to the European Hospital in Khan Yunis, which is only 7km from here. But today I still don’t have enough diesel in the ambulance to drive to the hospital and back here again.”
Emirates Hospital director Dr Khamid Se’am says the hospital does not have an intensive care unit and needs to be able to transfer critically ill patients. ”Up to 20 babies a day are born here,” he says, ”and if they need specialist care we have to transfer them to the European hospital urgently.”
The hospital nursing director, Saleh Al-Hams, says: ”We are facing problems transferring patients, getting hold of emergency blood supplies and sending our doctors out on emergency calls.
”The bottom line is that patients’ lives in Gaza are being put at risk.” — Â