How the situation in Gaza really is because of the constant war with Israel is difficult to imagine from Brabant. Surgeon Ron van Doorn experiences it personally. He exchanged his hometown of Dongen for seven weeks before the heart of the Gaza Strip. Between the violence, he helps victims: “I have the privilege that I can help them.”
Ron works as so -called Life and Limb Saving-surgeon. This means that he deals with acute, life -saving or member -saving operations in conflict areas. For example, he was in Syria, Afghanistan, and now in the Gaza Strip. From the improvised operating room (OK) about ten kilometers above Rafah, he tells open about what he sees of the conflict, why it pulls him and whether he fears for his life.
Ron also operated in the Gaza Strip in 2018. He was left with a special bond with the people. “It’s a kind of open -air prison. People don’t have a passport, no freedom and no means to stand on their own two feet.”
“The injustice I see here with my own eyes touches me.”
The Emergency Hospital has room for 75 people and is close to the Nasser Hospital, which is overcrowded. There are six hundred people there, while there can actually only be two hundred. “People bring their own mattress, otherwise they will be on the floor.” The OR where Ron works mainly treats shot and shards in the chest, belly or limbs. So he is mainly concerned with fierce operations, such as amputations and reconstructions.
Ron is ready day and night. “Sometimes it is calm for hours, then suddenly dozens of people come in with shot wounds, or injury due to explosions.”
Many people from his environment cannot imagine what Ron sees in the area full of danger and suffering. He shows a photo of his slippers, and his feet smeared with blood and laughs carefully: “My clogs are still on the road, I am now working on borrowed slippers. You can’t imagine that you are working that way in the Netherlands.”
He has seen a lot and talks about fierce operations in children as if it is nothing, but he is not immune to the suffering and the stories: “What happens here touches me. The people, the stories and the injustice I see with my own eyes touches me.” That made him take action. “Others protest at stations, I am grateful that I can help in this way. That is a privilege.”
“My environment fears for my life, but I think I am safe.”
His wife in Dongen is worried. According to Ron, the chance that things will go wrong, but exists: “A colleague was hit by a bullet, that just went well.” He himself feels safe. “I know Dongen is safer, and I know it is false security, but it still feels good.”
The first time he returned from a war zone, he got a big culture shock: “I had nothing there and now I have everything again, I thought. How unfair! How is that? But you also get used to that.”
He is not afraid that he has a trauma. “In the Netherlands, doctors also see fierce things, people who die or get cancer. Here it is more extreme, but all doctors recognize this and learn to deal with it.” And Ron does not make any illusions: “I feel connected to these people, but they are not my family.”
“If there are shortages, the patients will eat and the medical staff will not.”
What does Ron notice from the bombing and the famine? “There is a constant buzz of drones and we often hear shots, sometimes followed by a flurry of new patients,” he says. When he entered Gaza, he was overwhelmed by emotion: “I had been here before, but there is no more house standing up, it is his heaps of stone. That is bizarre what you see and feel,” he says.
He also notices the shortage of food: “People are weak and after such a fierce operation they can’t really reconsider.” The team had taken military survival packages. “Fortunately we have a cook who always knows how to make something of it,” he laughs relieved. “Food food is hard to find here. We get one meal a day, and if there is short, the team does not eat, and only eat the patients.”
After seven weeks he has to go back home. Just recover. But Ron already knows: he wants to go back. “As soon as possible, I will go again. Just how grateful the people are here. You will never forget that again.”
