Lamia Kalloub, 63, sits in her wheelchair at the Al-Aqsa hospital in Deir al-Balah, waiting her turn for the dialysis machine. The room is crowded, and she is tired.
Lamia used to receive dialysis treatment at al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, but she has been displaced from her home in the city by the ongoing Israeli assault and the hospital itself has been gutted. Now, her only option for treatment is at al-Aqsa, the one remaining functioning hospital in the central Gaza Strip.
Before the massive Israeli offensive began on October 7, the hospital had 150 patients requiring dialysis. Now, that number has more than doubled to about 350, including 13 children. However, the hospital has just 24 dialysis machines, and thus rationing is necessary.
Meanwhile, a large number of Gazans have sought refuge in the hospital, crammed into corridors and waiting rooms. Due to the Israeli evacuation orders, many chronic disease patients who had been treated at hospitals in the north now come to al-Aqsa. Patients like Lamia pay the price.
Lamia arrived for her recent treatment at 7 a.m. and waited five hours for a machine to be available. “I am desperate for my turn, because I am exhausted,” she sys, adding that, before even starting her wait, “I spent an hour getting to the hospital due to the lack of fuel.” At the beginning of the war, Israel banned fuel from entering Gaza. Animal-driven carts are now the most common form of transportation. For Lamia, it was a donkey.
Lamia has been displaced twice. After being forced to evacuate her own home, Lamia moved in with her daughter.
“My daughter’s house in Deir al-Balah is close to al-Aqsa Hospital, but I still had to queue for hours to make the trip to the hospital,” she says. “Then the Israelis bombed my daughter’s house, and she was killed.”
After that tragedy, Lamia sought shelter in an UNRWA school. She is now one of more than 1.2 million Palestinian refugees sheltering in 156 UNRWA facilities in the Gaza Strip.
“The life there is terrible,” she says. “There is very little food or fresh water.” Clean drinking water is very important for dialysis patients, and Lamia sends her son out to find some.
Sabah Yassin, from Gaza City’s Zeitoun neighborhood, is another example of a dialysis patient who is struggling. When the heavy bombing started, her family initially went to Al-Shifa for shelter, along with about 5,000 other displaced people. However, on the sixth day of the war, Al-Shifa went out of service after running out of fuel.
Sabah has been on dialysis since 2020, attending sessions at Al-Shifa three times a week for four hours each. Once the facility stopped functioning, her family fled to Deir Al-Balah, and now she only gets dialysis once or twice a week for about two and a half hours. The result is that Sabah suffers from severe fatigue and swelling in all of her limbs.
Osama Aburahma, head of the Department of Kidney Dialysis at Al-Aqsa Hospital, explains that fewer, shorter treatments are the new norm. “Previously, dialysis patients went to a clinic three times a week, but we have reached full capacity these days, since other dialysis services are out of service. Now, we can only take patients once or twice a week for an hour or two. And even with those changes, we are at risk due to a lack of fuel and an acute shortage of the necessary medical supplies, particularly blood filters for children.”
In addition, Dr. Aburahma says medical staff are being asked to work four shifts per day instead of two.
“Two-and-a-half-hour treatments once or twice a week is not enough,” Sabah says. “Now, the sessions barely clear my blood of toxins and fluids. I have difficulty even sleeping at night.”
