The Responsibilities of God with None of His Power

By: Abu Yusef

Picture: The Guardian.co.uk

For nearly two years Gaza has been under siege.

Medicine has not been allowed to enter at nearly the needed rates – and even things such as gauze pads run out quite often in hospitals throughout the Strip. For years now, Doctors and health workers have had to ‘improvise’ to save lives.

Hospitals have faced power cuts, and nurses have had to run breathing assistance machines by hand – for hours and even days – to keep people alive until the lights turned back on.

For years these medical professionals have worked in some of the most difficult conditions possible. Enduring long hours, and the constant knowledge that:

‘If I had only had more … I could have saved their life’

They work under a significant handicap – but they continue to work.

Vicious aerial, and now ground, offensive on the Gaza Strip has only exacerbated the difficulties facing health workers.

Now they must treat thousands of people with little or no supplies, personnel or medicine. The hospital hallways are overrun by the dead and dying.

There is so much death and destruction that doctors can not even begin to cope.

They have to choose who will be saved and who will die; who will be given a short time under their healing hands and who will be left screaming and bleeding on the floor.

Every day now, each doctor in Gaza is making this decision dozens of times a day.

‘Does this child have a chance to live? If I try to save him, how many others will die? Does he ‘deserve’ precious morphine? a bed?’

They have all of the responsibilities of God, but none of His power.

They are delivering babies in homes, in cars and in makeshift shelters. They performing surgeries in basements, and praying to God that the needles and tools they have been forced to use are clean.

They are sawing off arms and legs which they could possibly save if there were just more time, more supplies, more electricity and less death.

They are rushing out into bombed streets to pick up the wounded under fire. Their ambulances are targeted by air strikes, and they still go out again and again.

They do not sleep. They do not get to stay with their families during the horrors of war.

They have to stay awake and they have to keep working.

They have to forget that same bombs and bullets which are bringing thousands of victims to their door, are also falling on their homes and on their children. They cannot focus on that; they have to keep working.

Dr. Wadi of Shifa hospital was doing just that yesterday. He had to forsake his family to do his duty as a doctor.

Yesterday, his fifteen year old daughter Christina was brought to hospital dead.

The air strikes slowed her journey long enough for her to finally succumb to an asthma attack. Something so simple took the daughter away from this doctor-God.

All of the lives he has saved and lost over the last week, all of the judgments over life and death that he had been asked to make, and when his own daughter arrives, it is already too late.

She is one of Christianities newest martyrs, and this week she joins a host of others -Muslim and Christian- in the Gaza Strip who have had their lives stolen from them this week.

Israel should say a prayer and give thanks to Dr Wadi and the other ‘Powerless Gods’ in Gaza. While these men and women work and suffer and even die Israel is the only winner.

It is the efforts of these men and women health workers that have kept the body count and casualty rate so low.

If not for their work, this despicable crime would have already claimed hundreds more lives.

Despite their efforts, it looks like it will anyway.