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21-09-2024
(Warning: This report contains graphic details)
BERUIT: A Lebanese surgeon has described how the sheer volume of severe wounds from two days of exploding device attacks forced him to act “robotic” just to be able to keep working.
Surgeon Elias Jaradeh said he treated women and children but most of the patients he saw were young men. The surgeon said a large proportion were “severely injured” and many had lost the sight in both eyes.
The dead and injured in Lebanon include fighters from Hezbollah, the Iranian backed armed group which has been trading cross-border fire with Israel for months and is classed as a terrorist organization by the UK and the US.
But members of their families have also been killed or wounded, along with innocent bystanders. Elias Jaradeh described the wounded he treated as looking “mostly civilian”.
The bomb attacks which killed 37 people including two children have been widely blamed on Israel, which has not claimed responsibility.
Dr Jaradeh, who is also an MP for the Change parliamentary bloc, was working at a specialist eye and ear hospital where some of the most severely wounded people were sent. He said it had taken a toll on the medical teams, himself included.
“And, yes, it’s very hard,” the surgeon said. “You have to dissociate yourself. More or less, you are robotic. This is the way you have to behave, but inside, you are deeply injured. You are seeing the nation injured.”
Surgeons like Dr Jaradeh worked for almost 24 hours continuously on the wounded, many of whom have lost their eyesight or the use of their hands, the country’s health minister told media.
Eye specialist Prof Elias Warrak told media that in one night he extracted more damaged eyes than he had previously in his entire career.
“It was very hard,” he said. “Most of the patients were young men in their twenties and in some cases I had to remove both eyes. In my whole life I had not seen scenes similar to what I saw yesterday.”
Health Minister Firass Abiad told media the victims’ injuries would prove life-changing.
“This is something that unfortunately will require a lot of rehabilitation,” he said.
About 3,200 people were injured, most of them in Tuesday’s attack which saw thousands of pagers detonated.
Wednesday’s attack, which detonated two-way radio devices, wounded about 450 people but was responsible for 25 deaths, twice as many as in Tuesday’s blasts.
Abiad told the BBC the attacks constituted a war crime.
“The whole world could see that these attacks occurred in markets,” he said.
“These were not people who were at the battleground fighting. They were in civilian areas with their families.”
Witnesses described seeing people with severe wounds to their faces and hands after the attacks.
Journalist Sally Abou al-Joud says she saw patients “covered in blood” at hospitals, where ambulances were arriving “one after the other within the minute”. Most injuries she saw were “in the faces and the eyes”.
“We’re talking about hands injured, severely injured fingers torn, I’ve heard some doctors say we need to perform amputation surgeries to remove hands… they need to perform surgeries for eyes to remove them,” she said.
One woman told media on Thursday that what they had seen was a “massacre in every sense of the world”. (Int’l News Desk)
