Carolyn Beeler: Dr. Li, what have you seen in your ER today?

Bing Li: After the strike, the ER was actually filled with children, some of them wandering around with bloody wounds, some of them in stretchers. And of these children, a 5-year-old died on arrival, and a 1-year-old, a baby, had part of his skull broken open by shrapnel and had lost his entire right eye, basically blown open.

That is devastating. What were you able to do for that baby?

For injuries like this, unfortunately, it’s going to be a lifetime of disability. The rest of the eye, whatever’s left, can’t be salvaged in these cases, especially with the contamination and the force of these types of injuries. Children shouldn’t be facing blast injuries. They shouldn’t be facing bombs. Nobody should, but especially not a 1-year-old. And so, that eye will have to be removed surgically. And what’s even more horrendous is that from a medical standpoint, this baby is now also at risk of losing the other eye, because once there is such an injury where there’s a rupture to one eyeball, the other eyeball is at risk to also be attacked by the body’s own immune system. And so, he’s at risk of losing sight in both eyes.

That’s just one of those children who landed in your ER today after that airstrike. You said there were a lot of children today. Is that typical? Do you have any idea how many of your patients on most days are kids?

It is pretty normal to see many children in the trauma bay and in the ER. I know one of the mornings when I was woken up very early because there was an airstrike in the early morning, basically the entire trauma bay, the critical care area, was filled with children. Usually when you get any child that has a devastating injury, where a child that loses pulses basically dies in front of you, you try to do anything that you can to get that child back and take as much time as possible for that child. But in those cases, I remember there was a little girl who lost pulses being transported from the scene to the ER, and we had to tell her family that there’s nothing we could do, that there were too many patients to work on and too many other children who could be saved who had to be worked on.

I know that you have been in Gaza on this current stint since shortly before the ceasefire was declared last October, and then you had one more trip into Gaza before that. How does what you are seeing now compare to what you saw before the ceasefire was signed?

Is that typical, that there’s only electricity for the absolute most necessary uses there?

It’s not something that’s been constant, but it’s been happening more frequently.

We know that conditions outside the hospital are not easy either. Nearly a million Palestinians in Gaza are living in tents in the sweltering heat. The only place to cool off is in the sea. And along the Gaza Strip, those waters are polluted with sewage and waste because there’s not proper wastewater infrastructure remaining. Are a lot of people getting sick from that?

Absolutely. We see many skin wounds and many very serious infections due to these wounds. For example, there is a patient who passed just yesterday from basically coming in with a very serious skin infection, and then before anything could really be done for her, she had passed in the emergency room, likely because of the severity of the infection. And the organization that I’m here with called Glia, we actually help run and fund a wound care clinic that is functioning out of Nasser Hospital. And in this clinic, they see dozens of patients every day who have devastating wounds. Many of them occurred during the beginning of the war when things weere more intense and still haven’t been able to heal because of a combination of lack of sanitation, poor conditions, especially now in the sweltering heat in the tents that they live in.

Dr. Li, throughout this conversation, I’ve been hearing what sounds to me like planes in the background. Are there planes flying overhead?

That’s a striking allegation. What about clean water? That’s also been a problem for people in Gaza for a long time. What are conditions outside of the hospital for drinking water, for bathing water, things like that?

Many of my colleagues report that finding water for the day is usually the first order of operations that they have to worry about, and it can take a long time. Most of the time it’s children who are tasked with this. You see children carrying these large jugs wandering around searching for water. Because of the lack of fuel and also the lack of lubricant material and engine oil that’s getting into the Gaza Strip that’s essential for running equipment to desalinate water, desalination plants are also at risk of collapsing, just like the medical system that I was talking about being at risk of collapsing. Last October, Israel signed an agreement agreeing to withdraw further from what is now the so-called yellow line, as part of the ceasefire. However, now it’s actually gone in the opposite direction, where the Israeli forces are actually moving inward and taking up more land. So in fact, the ability of people to try to go back to their homes, that hope essentially evaporated.

Are Israeli troops visible, around right now?

Is there something about what is happening in Gaza now, something you’ve seen that you wish people outside of Gaza could see for themselves to understand?

When, like, a child is injured and because of the blockade, there isn’t even adequate pain medication at times to give to a child or to a young person who’s waiting for their turn to go to the operating theater. It just speaks to the fact that, first of all, that child is being injured in a situation where that shouldn’t be happening at all. And also to the medical blockade, where a fundamental human right to be able to provide relief for that child isn’t even available enough, where you have to ration that and save it for the operating theater, rather than be able to give it while the child is in pain in the emergency room.

Rationing painkillers. I wonder, you know, we’ve been hearing stories of how people in Gaza continue to have each other’s backs to try to help wherever they can, even when people don’t have a lot of resources. I’m wondering if that’s something you’re still seeing day-to-day there.