Khalid Khalifa waves his right hand when he talks about the Israeli planes that darkened the sky over Gaza City, November 15, 2023. He points to his eye and then points to something invisible above his head. His left arm, amputated, is bandaged. “The Israelis saw from the sky that among us there were children and women. They still dropped their bombs”says this 41-year-old Palestinian, met on the Diksmuidethe 31st of December.
The French amphibious helicopter carrier (PHA), partially transformed into a hospital, has been anchored since the end of November 2023 in the port of Al-Arich, in Egypt, off the coast of Gaza, to help the wounded in the Palestinian enclave. The French Navy building today has 40 beds, two operating theaters, a treatment room for treating major burns, scanners and analysis laboratories. Nearly 70 civilian and military healthcare personnel are on board. Khalid Khalifa is one of 88 patients treated by the Diksmuide since the start of his mission.
Sitting on a chair in the ship’s light hospitalization area, this vegetable and fruit seller recounts the forty-eight hours he spent under the rubble waiting for his neighbors to find him. Then Khalid Khalifa saw the Israeli tanks arriving. “I was surrounded by dead people. My neighbors dug me up in secret, so the Israelis wouldn’t see me. Otherwise they would have taken me with them”explains the man with the beard and salt-and-pepper hair.
“I had visible bones”
Seriously injured, he did not go to the hospital because of the intense bombardments. “Also, there was no ambulance”, he slips. His left arm turning black and becoming infected, he still decided to go to Al-Aqsa hospital, “in a coach, pulled by a horsehe specifies. I had visible bones. The doctors at the hospital told me that my arm could have been saved, but it was too late.”. He is an amputee.
The medical team puts him on the list of requests for evacuation to Egypt. He arrives on the Diksmuide in mid-December, leaving behind him, in the south of Gaza, near the crossing point with Egypt, in Rafah, his daughter and his wife. “I was able to call them this morning using the hospital phonehe said. They are fine, thank goodness! »
According to the French Minister of the Armed Forces, Sébastien Lecornu, on an official visit to the Diksmuideon the occasion of the New Year, the majority of the wounded taken care of in the helicopter carrier have already received care in the Gaza Strip, where the health system is however seriously impacted by the war and where medical resources have become extremely rudimentary. ” They [les blessés] present particularly significant complications”explains the Minister of the Armed Forces on board, who emphasizes the “close partnership” with Egypt, without which the operation could not have succeeded.
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