[Dr. Clayton Dalton – voice over] The devastation was astonishing. I certainly had never seen anything like what we saw there. My name’s Clayton Dalton. I’m an emergency physician, and this piece in “The New Yorker” is about my experience traveling to Gaza during the ceasefire as part of the medical aid team.

And the damage started immediately as soon as we entered to the Gaza site. You mostly stay in a single hospital you’re assigned to one specific facility, and you stay there. For safety reasons, it’s dangerous to leave the hospital. And then the ceasefire changed everything. Decisions were being made in real time as we arrived in terms of where we’d be most useful and where we would go.

First night was in Nasser Hospital, which is one of the chief hospitals in Khan Yunis. It had been the site of a siege and a raid by the IDF and had been targeted. There were shrapnel scars on the building bullet holes, like destroyed, and sort of shattered ambulances on the ground. And so all these little reminders of the fact that this had been a war zone. Almost every room in the entire hospital had an X that had been hacked into the wall next to it, which had been put there by Israeli forces as they had moved through clearing the hospital.

Al-Shifa was the most important hospital in Gaza. It’s where the most complicated cases get referred. Herrara, who was running the emergency department there, he took me through the main hospital complex. And Herrara has on his phone photographs of what the department had looked like. You just couldn’t believe the contrast. I mean, on his phone, it looks like any American hospital. It looks like the hospital where I had trained.

On the grounds behind the main building of the hospital, there was a makeshift graveyard. I saw this at pretty much every hospital I visited in Gaza, is there would be nowhere to put the patients who were dying, and so they would just bury them in the courtyards wherever they could find space.

This was Indonesian Hospital. Sultan was the director of the hospital, a cardiologist. And he sort of walked me through one of the most disturbing discoveries that he made. He took me up into the ICU and showed me a number of different pieces of medical equipment. And all of them seemed to have a bullet hole in the screen. He was like, “I don’t understand.” And I get that. I also was struggling to understand. This didn’t seem like collateral damage to me. You know, these were specific pieces of medical equipment that seemed to have been systematically disabled. And I had a hard time trying to think of a way that this would be addressing a military threat. Because this is equipment that’s just used to take care of patients and nothing more. You can’t weaponize a dialysis machine.

And in Gaza, there wasn’t space, there wasn’t personnel, there weren’t resources, there weren’t medications, there just wasn’t enough. There are no hospital gowns at al-Aqsa Hospital. There just wasn’t the capacity in the healthcare system or the resources or enough surgeons or enough sterile gauze. If you imagine someone has a broken leg in Gaza, they didn’t have the orthopedic doctors, they didn’t have the equipment, they didn’t have the operating rooms. You can offer this procedure called external fixation. And the way you do this externally is you push metal pins through the skin, you screw them in to either end of the bone, and then you attach them outside of the body to a metal scaffold. One estimate that was shared with me was that 26,000 patients who are just living with external fixation hardware.

But there’s still people living there. Hundreds of thousands of people really were residents of Khan Yunis before the conflict and many people have relocated there. And they’ve just had to find a way to continue their lives there amidst the rubble. And so, you know, we see sort of normal things. We see people tending little plots, little gardens. And in between shattered, collapsed buildings and doing laundry. And so many children who were just running in groups and gangs and finding ways to play and building forts and swinging from downed power lines.

– [In video – Dr. Dalton] Oh man. – [In video – man] I guess there’s no power anyway.

[Dr. Clayton Dalton – voice over] I worry about the safety of people I know, friends, American healthcare workers and physicians who are still there, who were still going. And then also the people that we worked alongside, the Palestinian healthcare workers. And the work they’re doing is so hard. It is so unspeakably difficult. And I think we come back out and we were like, it’s hard to even remember how bad it was when you leave again. It almost feels like a nightmare that you’ve woken up from. But for the people who are there living it, there is no waking up. They can’t escape it there. That is just their life.