Gaza kidney patients face dialysis crisis at packed hospitals

Gaza: Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, the only hospital still functioning in the central Gaza Strip, reached full capacity days ago. Injured people lie on the hospital floors, medical tents and mattresses holding patients occupy the space outside the building, while dead bodies continue to arrive at the facility.

Thousands of displaced Palestinians have taken refuge here, squeezing themselves in corridors and waiting rooms. Meanwhile, many patients with chronic diseases who were being treated at hospitals in the north of the besieged enclave are now at Al Aqsa Martyrs, having fled their homes after evacuation orders from the Israeli military.

For kidney patients, dialysis treatment is a matter of life and death.

Before the latest Israeli offensive began on October 7, the hospital had 143 patients requiring dialysis. Now, the number of patients has more than doubled to about 300, including 11 children who all have just 24 dialysis machines between them.

Iyad Issa Abu Zaher, the hospital’s director general, said the facility is overwhelmed.

“We have resorted to rationing of all resources and medical supplies,” he told Al Jazeera. “A kidney dialysis patient now undergoes treatment once or twice a week for an hour or two, but before they used to come in three times a week.”

Even before the war, Gaza’s health ministry had warned that the lives of 1,100 kidney failure patients, including 38 children, were at risk due to a lack of fuel and an acute shortage of the necessary medical supplies needed for dialysis.

Last month, Alaa Helles, the director of the Hospital Pharmacy Department at Gaza’s Ministry of Health, said the territory’s hospitals provided 13,000 dialysis sessions every month.

This requires more than 13,000 filters, 13,000 blood collection tubes and 26,000 blood cannulas per month, but since Israel and Egypt control the territory’s border crossings, even before the war patients were often left to wonder whether there would be enough supplies to treat them.

The Gaza Strip has been under an Israeli blockade for 16 years with the movement of goods severely curtailed by Israel and Egypt.