MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Israel bars international journalists. It also bars aid organizations like Doctors Without Borders from entering Gaza. But in Dubai, NPR's Aya Batrawy spoke with American doctors who have been in Gaza about what they saw three years into the war.
AYA BATRAWY, BYLINE: Dr. Nahreen Ahmed is a pulmonologist from Philadelphia who's been on three medical rotations to Gaza since the start of the war. I spoke with her on a visit there last month.
NAHREEN AHMED: Luckily, like, I was only of a group of two people with the organization I entered with, and both of us got approved to enter, which is not always the case.
BATRAWY: She and other American doctors NPR spoke with say Israel arbitrarily decides which doctors it allows in and severely restricts what they can bring in with them.
AHMED: I have needed a portable ultrasound, like, almost every day, three or four times during the day. That would have changed my clinical decision-making, like, in the moment. And I could have brought four of those in a backpack and I couldn't bring any of that because those are not allowed to be brought in.
BATRAWY: Israel's military body, COGAT, controls Gaza's single open border crossing. It says it facilitates the entry of medical supplies through U.N. agencies and aid groups. But Israel does not publish a list of banned items, leading to what aid groups say is a lack of clarity around the rules. Most of Gaza's hospitals were destroyed in Israeli raids and airstrikes during the war. The rest are partially functioning. Here's an example from one of Gaza's biggest hospitals.
ARIF HUSAIN: At Al-Aqsa Hospital, the CAT scan machine would constantly be out of power or needed spare parts and wasn't able to be used. So they would have to - let's say, for example, a patient had a stroke. You would have to wait one or two days to get a CAT scan even.
BATRAWY: That's Dr. Arif Husain, a neurologist from New York. He says he felt like he was treating patients in Gaza blindly, making medical decisions based on judgment, not proper testing and imaging.
HUSAIN: This one patient was maybe in her 60s or 70s, had a stroke. I didn't know if it was a bleeding type of stroke or an ischemic or a lack of blood flow issue. So you're waiting for a CAT scan for two days. You finally figure out it's a bleeding stroke. Now you can't do much about it after that.
BATRAWY: He says strokes are time sensitive and that she needed rehabilitation, but the hospital is overwhelmed with patients.
HUSAIN: I remember the family was getting so upset. They said we can't take her back to our tent, you know. She can't use half her body. She needs rehabilitation. And it was just, you know, difficult to watch.
BATRAWY: COGAT did not respond to the specific details raised by the American doctors but said that since the start of the ceasefire a year ago, more than 24,000 tons of medical supplies and equipment have entered Gaza. But even blood sugar tests that are sometimes given hourly in American hospitals are rationed and in critically short supply, says Dr. Nada Mallick, a pediatric critical care doctor from Washington, D.C.
NADA MALLICK: I think you go, and you realize that you're up against obstacles that are bigger than any one person, right? I mean, you need tools, lab equipment, operating equipment to really reverse some of these disease processes. And you just don't have access to that.
BATRAWY: The doctors interviewed by NPR say basics like chemotherapy drugs, blood thinners, stents for heart surgery and inhalers are hard to find or banned a year into the ceasefire. Dr. Ahmed, from Philadelphia, says her patients can't find diabetes medications, either. And she says there's a shortage of oxygen in hospitals because they don't have the spare parts needed to refill the tanks.
AHMED: We're handicapped in so many different ways. We're seeing the consequences of the conflict itself and then handicapped in how to diagnose and manage it properly.
BATRAWY: Dr. Mallick, the pediatrician, says she also saw a lot of chronic malnutrition in children. One child was nine months old and weighed just under five pounds - less than an average newborn in the U.S.
MALLICK: And he actually died of a heart attack from those nutritional deficiencies.
BATRAWY: Dr. Mallick says babies like him need what's known as total parenteral nutrition, or TPN. It's a specialized formula that his family couldn't find.
Aya Batrawy, NPR News, Dubai. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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