The Democratic National Convention held its first-ever panel on Palestinian rights Monday (August 19, 2024), including harrowing testimony from Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, who volunteered at a hospital in Gaza earlier this year.
For the past 10 months, we have witnessed civilian massacre after civilian massacre. School massacres where internally displaced people were sheltering. The flour massacre )29 February 2024(, massacres of people trying to collect water, massacres of people collecting aid at aid sites, massacre after civilian massacre. Entire families exterminated in one single bomb. Humanitarians, health care workers, killed, and journalists, killed in record numbers. Pediatric amputations, amputations in children that are breaking records. Over 17,000 children who have lost one or both parents since October in Gaza. We have treated so many children who have lost their entire family that a term has been coined to describe these children. You’ve probably heard it. Wounded Child No Surviving Family, WCNSF. This is a term that has been coined since October to describe this very frequent phenomenon that I’ve personally witnessed more times than I can count while I was there.
For children, I have held the hand of children who are taking their last gasps because their entire family was killed in the same attack and couldn’t be their holding their hand and comforting them and could not bury them thereafter. For the children who I treated who were discharged, they were, and survived. They face a Russian roulette of 100 ways that they will likely and potentially die when they leave the hospital due to the circumstances incompatible with life that have been architectured by this military assault. Direct bombing, starvation, dehydration, disease, alarming reports of the first cases of polio in Gaza right now. Polio is a potentially deadly disease that causes paralysis, including paralysis the muscles needed to breathe, that has been eradicated for decades in that region. There has been a polio vaccination campaign that essentially has eradicated the disease from the majority of the world, and now we’re seeing cases emerging in an area of the world that has a healthcare system that has been completely and entirely annihilated.
I mentioned these wounded children with no surviving family. I’m going to give you two quick stories just so that you can humanize what I mean when I say this because I know it’s really hard to hear these numbers and think about individuals and what this means to them.
I received a young boy into the emergency department during one of the mass casualties who had half of his face and neck blown off. Luckily, the organs that are vital for breathing and blood supply to the brain were preserved. They were visible but preserved and he was talking to us. He couldn’t see himself, so he didn’t know what he looked like at that point in time, and he kept asking for his sister. His sister was in the bed next to him. The majority of her body was burned beyond recognition. He didn’t recognize that the girl in the bed next to him was the sister. His entire family, parents and the rest of his siblings were killed in the same attack. That boy survived and the next day I went to see him. A very young plastic surgeon, one of the few remaining plastic surgeons in Gaza, because the others have either been killed or have fled understandably, had removed part of his chest and created a graft to cover those organs of the neck. He was lying in his bed and mumbling, because it was so difficult to talk, and he kept saying – I got really close to him and he said, I wish I had died too. And I said, what? And he said, I think my entire family has gone to heaven. It’s not “my entire family”. His exact words were something like: Everybody I love is now in heaven. I don’t want to be here anymore.
That is one of so many stories. I’m giving you, I’m so sorry, Leila, but I think people need to hear this (in response to distress expressed by one of the panelists). I’m giving you the story of one child.
One of my health care worker colleagues, a young nurse, one of the most dedicated nurses I’ve ever met, was trying to evacuate a patient when Al-Shifah Hospital was bombed from north to south. He carried that patient, and was eventually called by Israeli forces, not by name, but by uniform. “You, the person in scrubs, come here.” He was subsequently detained for 53 days. He reported physical, sexual, and psychological torture while in detention, and ultimately released because he had no crime. After he was released, he worked constantly. Because, one, he was so dedicated and, two, he suffered from severe insomnia from the trauma of his detention. He was always in the resuscitation of the emergency department, cleaning out sand from the eyes of people, pulled from under the rubble, trying to comfort them. One day, overnight, he fell asleep holding the body of a dead child still with the breathing tube in after they had failed to resuscitate the infant. Another day, I asked him to go home because he hadn’t slept in so many hours. So he left the hospital. A couple hours later, I see him in the emergency department trying to resuscitate a man whose arms and legs, sorry, whose both legs and one arm had been blown off. I asked him what he was doing in the hospital. I thought you went home to rest, and he said, this is my sister’s husband. They woke me up to tell me that the aid distribution site had been bombed and my sister’s husband had gone there. So I went to find him and found him severely injured. So I helped him resuscitate this patient. His home has been destroyed. He’s a young man. He’s engaged. He’s trying to get married. He had a whole life ahead of him. And he was a very dedicated health care worker.
I’m giving you two stories, a child and health care worker, but these are representative of literally almost everybody I know in Gaza. I don’t know a single health care worker who has not lost multiple members of their family. So as the US continues to fund this military campaign unconditionally and somewhat blindly, in stark contrast to documented realities on the ground, in stark contrast to the findings of the International Court of Justice of Plausible Genocide, and in stark contrast to the universal global condemnation of humanitarian and human rights organizations, we have no choice but to exert as much pressure as possible and use all the leverage we can to change direction, the direction that this country has taken.