This is not War! Eye witness from Nasser Hospital
This article was originally published by Η εφημερίδα των συντακτών on Sun 25 May 2025. by Kostas Zafeiropoulos, Η εφημερίδα των συντακτών.
Christos Georgalas, a celebrated head and neck surgeon, is one of the few Greek doctors who have volunteered in Gaza in recent months. He was found at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis in southern Gaza, for a month, as part of a mission by the British organization Medical Aid for Palestinians, from April 21, 2025 to May 21, along with a vascular surgeon and a plastic surgeon. Excerpts from his shocking interview returning to Kostas Zafeiropoulos in the Editors’ Newspaper, a testimony that moves you:
“Of the patients I treated, the percentage of children compared to adults was overwhelmingly higher. Talk about 8, 9 , 11, 6 year olds… The kids I was watching had neck injuries. Injuries of just a few millimeters from fragments, which had a very high entry speed. You saw a very small hollow in their neck, but by doing the scan you could tell that their laryngus, their groin, their spine had been dissolved. They are little pebbles. We recently had an equipment exhibition in Greece. So these kids could “use” to show how effective are these bombs, which, when they explode, send many small fragments that cover a huge surface. And whatever is there gets through them.
These crumbs are literally cursing children. There are of course dead children that we used to see at the morgue. 200 to 300 injured people arrived at the hospital daily. You can roughly calculate that the ratio of dead to injured is about 1 to 3.
This is a war mainly against children, which cannot be explained with the well-known argument “there is a large percentage of children in Gaza, so statistically there will be many child victims.” I think it’s pretty much a targeted attack, an Israeli MP has also said that “children are their future, so it’s twice as important to hit them than adults.” However, I did not imagine that I could see this politics so strongly.
I can’t say I went to war. War is a very different thing. There was no war in Treblinka, there was no war in Auschwitz. War has two armies. Here you have a population mainly of civilians and women, who have no possibility of escape. And it’s systematically raining bombs from sky. They beat hospitals, they beat journalists. The conditions of my colleagues there were tragic. But there’s still an optimistic part, imagine we even did homework! They had an exam for the interns. During the time I was there, we took multiple-choice exams for the internship batch, to advance for their degree and receive their majors degree.
Nasser Hospital was hit twice during the time I was there. One of the concerns we had before going with my team was that it had been struck again in March. When they had targeted, supposedly, a Hamas leader, the operating floor had been hit.
My first three weeks went by without the hospital being a target. Hit twice in the last week before I left. Last Wednesday [14/5], we slept inside, all day at the hospital for our own safety. We couldn’t just leave. We could barely go out to the courtyard.
We were on the fourth floor where the surgeries, intensive care unit and foreign doctors dorms were. The third floor was hit, just below us and at 3.30 in the morning, the burns unit. The target was a journalist. The journalist was killed, his neighboring bed and the nurses were injured. Five days later the courtyard with the hospital pharmacy was struck again. The first strike was with two drones, the second one was with a rocket.
A fellow volunteer, a Spanish man told me that when the Israelis had come to the hospital where there was an MRI, they were trying to destroy everything. But an MRI is a huge machine. It just like a car. Even if you shoot it, it can be fixed. So they brought in an engineer to destroy it permanently. Because even if a bomb was dropped next to him, it could have been repaired. A specialist who knows the heart of the machine had to come in to make it non functional. And he did just that last February.
In our hospital, the Israelis went through the chambers where the incubators were and systematically broke them one by one. The incubators with the sub-digger! These have been recorded by my colleagues.
The hospital, where I worked, had been occupied by Israelis for two months, in February and March 2024 The doctors who stayed in the hospital were tortured. They were lining them up one by one and beating them. They were abducted in total around 80. Of them 40 we do not know where they are or if they live. Many were killed on the spot.”
If one is looking to find out why some doctors were targeted in relation to others, there is a logic to it. This was no accident. Usually they were the best of their kind. For example, there was a doctor who performed implants. He became a target from the first moment. Exactly because he was the one who could re-create and so was key to providing the care. According to the universities those who were targeted from the first moment were those with the greatest academic work. The logic is that “we want to rewrite the future of Gaza”, so the targets were those who could rebuild it. Whether academically, clinically or even artistically.
Things have gotten a lot worse with the total lockdown. It’s the worst period in the whole period of genocide. We were relatively “favoured” – as Westerners and doctors -, we had the some food assured. Rice, that is, for a month. Our lunch was rice. Exclusively. There was nothing else. Sometimes beans were added with rice. There were no vegetables. There was no protein, fish, fruit, meat obviously not. I’ll just put it to you: my colleagues had lost 26 pounds since the beginning of the genocide. Me in one month I’ve lost about 8kg.