Sarah Vulstyeke is a project coordinator for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). She recently returned from the Gaza Strip, Palestine, where she coordinated operations with an MSF team in northern Gaza, where MSF runs mobile clinics to provide medical assistance to people through general consultations, treatment of non-communicable diseases, changing wound dressings, and health promotion.
During the first and second weeks of February, MSF mobile clinics were sent to Jabalia camp and Beit Hanoun. Around 1,200 consultations were conducted, with 11.6 per cent being children under five years. Just over 23 per cent of the consultations were upper tract respiratory infections and 169 dressings were done. Sarah describes what our team saw.
“When we arrived at the first health centre in the north of Gaza in early February to assess the situation, it was a slap in the face for all of us. There was nothing left to assess: we were shocked and felt helpless after realising how much infrastructure, how many buildings and lives, had been destroyed.
Right after the ceasefire [which took effect on 19 January 2025], one of our priorities was to look at how we could support access to basic healthcare for people in Gaza, especially in the northern part of the Strip. Jabalia camp had been besieged and heavily bombed by Israeli forces since 6 October 2024, and Israeli authorities dramatically reduced the quantity of essential aid authorised to enter.
Tens of thousands of people remained trapped in the north with barely any access to healthcare since last October; while hundreds of thousands returned there after the implementation of the ceasefire during end of January 2025.
The devastation we found in Jabalia is hard to describe; there was nothing left, only rubble. We tried to assess the conditions of health centres. But we visited the first one, and it was flattened. Then the second, the third... Everything was in ruins and reduced to piles of rubble. It’s breathtaking and heartbreaking. Looking at the scale of the destruction, we had no other choice but to act quickly.
The biggest challenge was to start and set up medical activities amid the rubble. It took a week to clear up enough rubble with our rented bulldozer, just to set up a temporary structure. The first week, we parked by the side of the road and began our activities.
Later, we were able to set up tents and shelters where patients could wait for their consultation. The weather was freezing, but still hundreds of patients came every day.
People in Gaza, as well as our teams, are determined to try to rebuild what was lost, despite the unbearable difficulties they face every day. The situation is still very precarious, and we are really worried about the consequences that a blockade of humanitarian aid into Gaza could have.
People in Gaza still need an immediate and massive scale-up of humanitarian supplies, and it is unacceptable that an entire population is now once again being prevented from receiving humanitarian aid.”