Released hostages Nili Margalit, left, and Sharon Aloni Cunio hold hands as they attend a press conference at the headquarters of the Hostages and Missing families forum in Tel Aviv, Israel, on February 7. Susana Vera/Reuters/File
An Israeli nurse who was held as a hostage in Gaza for 55 days has told of how she medically helped fellow hostages – including using honey to dress wounds in the absence of medicine.
Nili Margalit told a conference in Israel: “I always questioned whether I was doing the right thing… Will it make their health better, will it make their health worse?”
She was kidnapped from the kibbutz of Nir Oz on October 7, the same day her father was killed. In Gaza, she said she was held with elderly people in an underground tunnel, where it was difficult to breathe, due to a lack of oxygen and high humidity.
Margalit, a pediatric ER nurse, said she had become worried as her fellow hostages’ wounds became infected and then wouldn’t heal due to a lack of adequate antibiotics.
“Then I saw that they had honey. And I remembered that I used to dress wounds after surgeries with honey during my work, because it improves the healing of wounds… I prayed that it would help. And it did, it cleaned all the wounds.”
The hardest part of the ordeal was psychological, she said. “I tried to be positive… to keep the faith that we were going to make it and we were going to survive… If someone was really, really down, or really in a bad situation, I tried to do some encouragement talks.”
Margalit also spoke about the ethical challenges as a nurse, and not having the authority to make decisions on medications: “So, being the one that has to decide all those questions without the tools… it was a really big dilemma.”
Source: edition.cnn.com
