Surgeon 'became robotic' to treat sheer volume of wounded Lebanese
A Lebanese surgeon has described how the sheer volume of severe wounds from two days of exploding device attacks forced him to act "robotic" just to be able to keep working.
Surgeon Elias Jaradeh said he treated women and children but most of the patients he saw were young men. The surgeon said a large proportion were “severely injured” and many had lost the sight in both eyes.
The dead and injured in Lebanon include fighters from Hezbollah – the Iranian backed armed group which has been trading cross-border fire with Israel for months and is classed as a terrorist organisation by the UK and the US.
But members of their families have also been killed or wounded, along with innocent bystanders. Elias Jaradeh described the wounded he treated as looking "mostly civilian".
The bomb attacks – which killed 37 people including two children – have been widely blamed on Israel, which has not claimed responsibility.
Warning: This report contains graphic details
Dr Jaradeh, who is also an MP for the Change parliamentary bloc, was working at a specialist eye and ear hospital where some of the most severely wounded people were sent. He said it had taken a toll on the medical teams, himself included.
"And, yes, it's very hard," the surgeon said. "You have to dissociate yourself. More or less, you are robotic. This is the way you have to behave, but inside, you are deeply injured. You are seeing the nation injured."
Surgeons like Dr Jaradeh worked for almost 24 hours continuously on the wounded, many of whom have lost their eyesight or the use of their hands, the country's health minister told the BBC.
Eye specialist Prof Elias Warrak told BBC Arabic that in one night he extracted more damaged eyes than he had previously in his entire career.
"It was very hard," he said. "Most of the patients were young men in their twenties and in some cases I had to remove both eyes. In my whole life I had not seen scenes similar to what I saw yesterday."
Health Minister Firass Abiad told the BBC the victims' injuries would prove life-changing.
“This is something that unfortunately will require a lot of rehabilitation,” he said.
About 3,200 people were injured, most of them in Tuesday's attack which saw thousands of pagers detonated.
Wednesday's attack, which detonated two-way radio devices, wounded about 450 people but was responsible for 25 deaths, twice as many as in Tuesday's blasts.