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Background
The war in Gaza has caused an enormous surge in traumatic injuries while severely disrupting available rehabilitation services. Planning for the needs of survivors with injuries has been hampered by a lack of disaggregated data on injury type and severity. To fill this critical information gap, WHO and partners developed this estimate.
Daily reports from the Emergency Medical Teams (EMT) Minimum Data Set (MDS) for conflict from 10 January to 16 May 2024 were used as a proxy to estimate the number of major injuries requiring ongoing care and rehabilitation in Gaza. Our analysis uses the total number of people injured provided by the Ministry of Health (MoH), and assumes that a significant proportion of people will experience more than one injury. This is important, as from a planning perspective, we need to understand not only the total number of people injured, but the number of specific injuries (such as the number of amputations).
The analysis found that around 25% of all those injured (or 22 500 people) are likely to have acute and ongoing rehabilitation needs, including patients with extremity injuries, amputations, head and spinal cord injuries and burns. While extremity injuries are the dominant injury with about 15 000 cases, there are also likely to be 3000-4000 amputations, and over 2000 major head and spinal cord injuries, and over 2000 major burns.
Currently available rehabilitation services are heavily disrupted and do not come close to meeting the enormous surge in needs. Even if previous services are re-established, a massive scale-up of rehabilitation efforts is required. Rehabilitation services are key to preventing complications and ensuring the best possible recovery of survivors and must be considered an essential component of the ongoing emergency response.