{"id":41547,"date":"2025-08-02T10:01:06","date_gmt":"2025-08-02T10:01:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/41547\/"},"modified":"2025-08-02T10:01:06","modified_gmt":"2025-08-02T10:01:06","slug":"canadian-health-care-workers-treat-palestinians-wounded-while-seeking-aid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/41547\/","title":{"rendered":"Canadian health care workers treat Palestinians wounded while seeking aid"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Palestinians carry sacks of flour taken from a humanitarian aid convoy en route to Gaza City on Aug. 1.Jehad Alshrafi\/The Associated Press<\/p>\n

On a recent day working at a maternity hospital in Gaza City, Dr. Joanne Perry met a woman who had shown up insisting to speak with international staff. She needed help, but she didn\u2019t know where to go. Dr. Perry said the woman was paralyzed with grief. <\/p>\n

She had found out that her 15-year-old son was killed while trying to get food from a Gaza Humanitarian Foundation distribution site in the south. Her other son, who was with him, had been wounded and was having his leg amputated at another hospital.<\/p>\n

Dr. Perry, a Canadian physician with M\u00e9decins sans fronti\u00e8res (Doctors Without Borders), said with no such distribution sites in the north, she\u2019s not sure how the woman\u2019s children ended up in the south. But they must have been desperate.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou don\u2019t go there unless you want to risk your life for food,\u201d she said in an interview the morning after returning to Ottawa from Gaza<\/a> after a two-month mission.<\/p>\n

More than 60,000 Palestinians killed so far in Israel-Hamas war, Gaza\u2019s Health Ministry says<\/a><\/p>\n

The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, or GHF, is a private American company supported by the Israeli<\/a> and U.S. governments. It first set up its distribution points in May. Since then, it\u2019s been criticized by the United Nations and other agencies who say it weaponizes aid. <\/p>\n

The UN said on Friday that since May 27, nearly 1,400 Palestinians have been killed while seeking food, with most near the GHF sites and the remaining along food convoy routes. The UN human rights office said most of the killings were done by the Israeli military and that while it knows of \u201cother armed elements\u201d in the area, it doesn\u2019t have information indicating their involvement. The IDF has previously said it fired warning shots near the aid sites. <\/p>\n

In addition to Dr. Perry, The Globe and Mail spoke with two other Canadian medical workers who said they\u2019ve treated patients in Gaza who had serious injuries such as gunshot wounds after trying to get aid from GHF sites. <\/p>\n

On Friday, after intensifying criticism of Israel\u2019s aid distribution system from Canada and other Western allies, U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff visited one of the sites<\/a> in Rafah, in southern Gaza. <\/p>\n

GHF told The Globe that it has four sites operating in Gaza and it\u2019s pushing to open more, including in the north. They said civilians were injured and killed while looting UN convoys. They also said if the UN collaborated with the GHF they could combine and scale up their efforts. <\/p>\n

\u201cThey have hundreds of trucks sitting idly with aid rotting in the sun. GHF has offered to deliver the aid for free and to meet to find a way to work together to maximize the amount of aid getting into Gaza,\u201d the GHF said in a statement. \u201cOn safety, our civilians are safe within our distribution areas and have pressed the IDF to ensure safe passage way.\u201d<\/p>\n

The GHF said if the UN would collaborate with them they could \u201cend the violence\u201d around all aid sites.<\/p>\n

The IDF told The Globe in a statement that its forces have recently worked to reorganize the area by installing fences, opening more routes and other measures.<\/p>\n

After reported incidents of civilians being harmed at distribution sites, the IDF said in a statement: \u201cThorough examinations were conducted in the Southern Command and instructions were issued to forces in the field following lessons learned. The aforementioned incidents are under review by the competent authorities in the IDF.\u201d<\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Palestinians, mostly children, seeking a meal at a charity kitchen in the Mawasi area of Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip on July 22.-\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

While aid is starting to trickle into Gaza, over land and also from the air, aid organizations say it is not enough. <\/p>\n

Dr. Perry said the maternity hospital where she worked is over capacity, and that mothers share beds while babies share incubators. She said she has seen many malnourished pregnant women. Everyone is hungry. While driving from the hospital to where she stays people knock on the window, putting their fingers to their mouth, motioning they need food and water. Dr. Perry has also seen people collapsed on the side of the street. <\/p>\n

In the maternity hospital, she said, nutrition and overcrowding are not the only issue. While she was there, she said, six babies died on occasions when they were hooked up to ventilators when the electricity cut. <\/p>\n

Jack Latour, a Canadian nurse who works with MSF, spoke to The Globe earlier this week from southern Gaza. <\/p>\n

Ms. Latour, who was preparing to end her mission, said it was striking how much the situation deteriorated over seven weeks.<\/p>\n

She said she often saw people coming to the emergency room with injuries after going to get food from GHF\u2019s distribution sites. <\/p>\n

\u201cWhat I\u2019m seeing over and over again is people coming back with gunshot wounds, coming back with cuts from barbed wire in terms of laceration, coming back from pepper spray, but also close range pepper sprays, including in areas for example, the genitals.\u201d<\/p>\n

Witnessing starvation on the streets of Gaza<\/a><\/p>\n

Opinion: The wombs in Gaza will bear the scars of war<\/a><\/p>\n

Ms. Latour said the fact that people are getting seriously injured at aid sites \u201cdemonstrates the despair.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m seeing 13- and 15-year-olds coming in with gunshots because they went to go get food. It\u2019s hard to describe what has become normal here.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dr. Yvonne Ying is a plastic surgeon with MSF and just returned to Ottawa after working in a field hospital in Gaza. She worked from early in the morning until late in the evening, treating patients with blast injuries, such as complex fractures and amputations with open wounds. <\/p>\n

Dr. Ying said she could tell patients lost a lot of weight because she was able to close some wounds easily as they had a lot of lax skin. She said the volume of patients had increased compared to previous working trips to Gaza. <\/p>\n

She said she treated some patients who had gunshot wounds after seeking aid at the GHF sites. She said they were typically on the back of patients legs from where bullets grazed them. <\/p>\n

\u201cYou feel like you finally get a few complex wounds closed, but it just means there\u2019ll be another patient,\u201d she said. \u201cThe volume of patients, you couldn\u2019t keep up with them.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: Palestinians carry sacks of flour taken from a humanitarian aid convoy en route…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":41548,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[49,48,84,392,1008],"class_list":["post-41547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-health","tag-healthcare","tag-pleasemod"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41547","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41547"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41547\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/41548"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}