Sarah Vulstyeke is a project coordinator for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). She recently returned from the Gaza Strip, Palestine, where she coordinated operations with an MSF team in northern Gaza, where MSF runs mobile clinics to provide medical assistance to people through general consultations, treatment of non-communicable diseases, changing wound dressings, and health promotion. 

During the first and second weeks of February, MSF mobile clinics were sent to Jabalia camp and Beit Hanoun. Around 1,200 consultations were conducted, with 11.6 per cent being children under five years. Just over 23 per cent of the consultations were upper tract respiratory infections and 169 dressings were done. Sarah describes what our team saw.

“When we arrived at the first health centre in the north of Gaza in early February to assess the situation, it was a slap in the face for all of us. There was nothing left to assess: we were shocked and felt helpless after realising how much infrastructure, how many buildings and lives, had been destroyed. 

Right after the ceasefire [which took effect on 19 January 2025], one of our priorities was to look at how we could support access to basic healthcare for people in Gaza, especially in the northern part of the Strip. Jabalia camp had been besieged and heavily bombed by Israeli forces since 6 October 2024, and Israeli authorities dramatically reduced the quantity of essential aid authorised to enter. 

Tens of thousands of people remained trapped in the north with barely any access to healthcare since last October; while hundreds of thousands returned there after the implementation of the ceasefire during end of January 2025.