My mother-in-law died on 29 February in a tent in Rafah. The night before, my brother, Ibrahim, rang me to say she needed to be hospitalised. Over the previous two weeks, her skin seemed to have started to decompose and big, blood-red stains had spread over her body. Yet there is only one functioning hospital in Rafah these days, Abu Yousef al-Najjar. All our attempts to find her a place there failed. My father-in-law asked, through his tears: “What can we do?” My wife, Hanna, cried all night. It is impossible to express how helpless we felt, how powerless, how paralysed. It was not that nothing could be done, but that help could not be reached.
The next morning, she was throwing up almost constantly and fainting. Hanna tried to talk to her over the phone. All her mother said was: “I want to sleep, I want to sleep.” Ibrahim tried the hospital again. “She needs to be admitted into the intensive care unit,” the doctor said. But the ICU is overwhelmed with those injured by bombs and bullets and shells. Patients are treated while they lie on mattresses or on the bare floor outside the hospital, so overcrowded is it inside.
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