Thank you very much, MP Tabbara, for the question.
In terms of the medical supplies, as I mentioned before, for about 15 months there has been no entry of any kind of medical supplies. The good thing is that, for years, there has been storage by the Ghouta people in Arbin, which is on the west side of eastern Ghouta. There has been some storage of medical supplies, including catheters, anaesthesia drugs, and sutures, but most of them are expired now because of the 15 months.
A surgeon colleague, Dr. Hossam Hamdan, who works in the only hospital left in Douma, which our organization supports, tells me that he does not have certain surgical sutures. We are not even talking about the difficult-to-treat injuries. He had a patient come in for an urgent C-section, and he did not have sutures to oversew the uterus. He told me he was desperate. He didn't know what to do. He didn't know how he was a surgeon when he had no equipment and no sutures at hand.
There are certain sutures. There are catheters, for instance the Foley catheter or the central line catheter, that are essentially used to transfuse blood and to give saline. There are no saline bags. That is very essential for any kind of resuscitation of patients with injuries. There are no saline bags in Ghouta, and they're trying to produce saline but it's not safe. There are air strikes going on.
It is not a very good environment for any kind of production. Yesterday we heard that a pharmaceutical company was targeted by air strikes. It's not only 33 facilities that were targeted in the last two weeks. Even the few factories producing medical supplies have been targeted by air strikes from Russia or the Syrian regime.