Steven James

On Dec 27, Israel launched ‘Operation Cast Lead' on the Gaza Strip. The situation in Gaza prior to the attack was desperate. Some 18 months of the almost total blockading of Gaza's international land and sea borders meant that supplies of vital medicines, food, fuel and gas were desperately low.

It is critically important to remember that any attack on Gaza has added to the already dire situation on the ground. When I last visited Gaza a few months ago, I saw babies having to share incubators due to a lack of spare parts. I saw a baby named Ali who died a day later of a treatable condition, because he was denied a permit to leave Gaza for lifesaving care.

On Dec 27 heavy Israeli airstrikes destroyed police stations across Gaza, killing and wounding hundreds. MAP immediately deployed over $150,000 worth of high-tech surgical kits and blood donation facilities to hospitals to provide critical resources for emergency rooms.

As it quickly became clear that attacks would continue, MAP employed a series of additional staff to act as emergency pharmacists to coordinate the distribution of emergency medicines between the central store and the hospitals.

Following the land invasion, in partnership with the World Health Organisation, MAP has been coordinating the entry of medical and humanitarian supplies through the single crossing into Gaza.

We have hired a series of supply depots that can be used as staging areas for delivering the right medicines to the right hospitals to ensure that aid is a help, not a hindrance.

Meanwhile Gazans have suffered massively. Our team on the ground report that they have suffered night after night of total darkness, punctuated by the sound of tank fire and the distant crump of artillery. People are unable to move freely and simple chores like buying bread have become a deadly lottery, as attacks continue to kill and wound civilians.

Hospitals are running desperately low on essential medicines required to keep people alive. Our Gaza programme coordinator, Fikr Shalltoot, reported cases of health workers using cotton in place of gauze, which sticks to wounds; of hospitals running out of anaesthetic, and patients being referred from one facility to the next. It is, as he said, "a disaster."

MAP is also looking to supply displaced vulnerable people with disabilities and children under the age of five with hygiene kits. Doctors are working non-stop in terrible conditions - the number of wounded exceeds the number of beds in the whole of Gaza.

Quite simply nobody is safe in Gaza.

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