Two hospitals in Gaza, al-Shifa and Nasser, already use solar energy to run their intensive care units [Getty]
Gaza – Three years ago, a teenage boy plummeted three storeys to the ground in the pitch dark after accidentally stepping out of the side of his Gaza home, which was missing a wall due to Israeli shelling.
Taken to the emergency room at al-Shifa hospital, he was handed over to Ben Thomson, a volunteer doctor from Canada.
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| Thomson teamed up with several Canadian doctors to launch Empower Gaza [Courtesy of Ifpress website] |
Thomson began inserting a chest tube to drain the air and blood that had accumulated outside of the boy’s lungs – a procedure that usually takes only a few minutes to complete. With the power out, however, Thomson struggled to operate.
“I couldn’t see. I was trying to put this [chest tube] in, in the dark. What would have normally taken me five minutes or less, took me about 25 to 30 minutes, and the boy died … because of something that was easily preventable,” Thomson told Al Jazeera.
“That could have been fixed. He could have survived, had I been able to see what I was doing. People are dying in Gaza quite often, regularly, every single day because of the lack of electricity.”
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