Here is an update from Dr. Mona El-Farra, our project director in Gaza, on how she is providing aid to children and families in Gaza with your support each and every day of the attacks. 

Here is an update from Dr. Mona El-Farra, our project director in Gaza, on how she is providing aid to children and families in Gaza with your support each and every day of the attacks. 

I’m staying in the al-Rimal neighborhood in Gaza in an apartment building with friends of mine.  So I’m only 700 meters away from the Red Crescent’s main clinic.  But I can’t walk there. It’s very risky to walk even 700 meters. Sometimes, the patient transporter vehicles pick me up. But now it’s maybe even riskier to be in an ambulance because Israel bombed four ambulances and killed nurses and ambulance drivers. 

Still, I need to go to the clinic every day. I’m a supervisor in the emergency room and help with first assessments and with assigning tasks to the staff and distributing medicine to patients.  We are giving out what medicine we have, including the medications donated by MECA with your support, but we are out of some prescriptions and we’re running low on other medicines.  During the evening, I go back to the building where the occupants of the neighborhood know I’m a doctor, and I help those people as well. 

In the night, I try to organize the distribution of milk and food parcels for children who are displaced in the UN schools or living in very devastated areas. These too are purchased thanks to donations to MECA. The UN schools call me to arrange distribution of milk because they are running out of supplies for all the displaced families. We do what we can but Israel rejected calls for a humanitarian ceasefire yesterday so we are all working under fire. Sometimes it takes several types of vehicles to transport the milk and food:  ambulances, UN cars and vans. But it’s still very risky.  

When I think about these families sleeping in the schools it makes me really sad. Just a few weeks ago, MECA was planning to support summer camps for children in the UN schools and our water purification and desalination units were going to serve the summer camps.  But now, more than one hundred thousand people are living in these UN schools with their families.  With the water crisis worsening under the bombing, I’m so glad that in 16 of the schools, our water units are providing clean water for the families.