Testimonies

About the archive of testimonies

A testimony is something entirely different from a report, a statistic, a headline. It carries within it the experience of a specific person, at a specific moment, and places on the listener an obligation that is hard to escape: to pay attention. This archive brings together testimonies of people who were there — doctors, medical staff, civilians — and presents their voices, unmediated and unfiltered, to anyone willing to hear.

Behind the Testimonies

Translators’ Introduction Introduction by Dr. Michal Feldon Letter from Dr. Ezzideen Shehab Compassion as a political act of resistance

International Doctors

When the war broke out, international journalists were banned from entering the Gaza Strip. The exceptions (those who could enter) were several dozen international doctors and healthcare workers, highly experienced in conflict zones, whose entry into the Strip was granted on a limited basis.

View testimonies About the project

Gaza Healthcare Workers

They are in the hospitals, struggling to treat the wounded — children, women, the elderly, civilians — to provide medical care without anesthesia, without equipment, without medication, in hospitals under siege and even directly bombed, as they themselves become targets.

Testimonies

About the archive of testimonies

Behind the Testimonies

International Doctors

Gaza Healthcare Workers

"They ordered him to abandon the patient who he was closing the wound on. He refused to do so. So, he was shot in the knee."

Dr. Mark Perlmutter

"As a human being, you can't, just can’t discount the unimaginable suffering that's happening here to children, to women, everybody."

Monica Johnson

"He had been injured as a result of an Israeli air strike. "

Dr. James Smith

"Her father was there, crying and asking me, ‘Can you save her? She’s my only child.’"

Dr. Fozia Alvi

Dr. Irfan Galaria

Dr. Thaer Ahmad

Dr. Vanita Gupta

Dr. Osaid Alser

Prof. Ghassan Abu-Sittah

Dr. Ahmed Moghrabi

"Their only crime was the fact that they were healing people."

Dr. Tammy Abughnaim

"Why did they target me? I'm a man. I have a job. I've never been involved in politics. I don't own a gun. Why was I chosen?"

Dr. Deirdre Noonan

Dr. Sarah Lalonde

Dr. Yipeng Ge

Dr. Rizwan Minhas

Dr. Dorotea Gucciardo

"These children would be laid on the floor, limp and lifeless, and we would declare them dead immediately. "

Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan

Anna Halford

Rohan Talbot

Shaina Low

"This was a bullet which was in the left upper thigh of a six-year-old child for the last few months. "

Dr. Junaid Sultan

"There were children with 70% to 80% body burns."

Dr. Mohammed Mostafa

Dr. Razan al-Nahhas

"There was virtually no formula feed to feed these newborn babies, all these infants."

Dr. Nick Maynard

"The scale of violence directed at Gaza’s civilians is unlike anything any of us has ever seen."

152 American Medical Professionals

"There are children who I met also, who had lost all their families."

Dr. Khaled Dawas

"That day will be for me this child that was seemingly sleeping all alone on the floor, you know, blood everywhere, you know, people screaming and this kid just [...] lying there and doing [...] nothing in the middle of a ton of noise."

Karin Huster

"We have normalized a situation in which it's normal to kill doctors."

Dr. Feroze Sidhwa

"The staff are continuing to turn up to work. They are hungry. They are fainting on the job"

Dr. Saira Hussain

"Literally every day I was there, I saw a child shot in the head. "

Dr. Feroze Sidhwa

Dr. Tammy Abughnaim

"There’s a designated area for children to die, alongside other dying children, where their families can stay with them and pray."

Dr. Feroze Sidhwa

"If there's any chaos, then, you know, they just start opening fire. And then we see it in our facility, you know, 20, 30 minutes later."

Dr. Mark Brauner

"Either the baby dies because there's no ventilator, or the baby dies because of the infection. Your options were tragically limited."

Dr. Mimi Syed

Dr. Aman Odeh

Dr. Thalia Pachiyannakis

"A war zone generates injuries that need soft tissue reconstruction, which is our specialty. So every time we go we make such a huge impact on the population, on the injured population"

Dr. Tom Potokar

Dr. Victoria Rose

"I was operating all day, I'm a surgeon, and there was an attack on the intensive care unit."

Dr. Nick Maynard

"The situation is catastrophic. Really, I'm very tired. I'm very tired. "

Dr. James Smith

Dr. Ahmed Moghrabi

"This is again an urgent plea to stop this and an urgent plea for help."

Dr. Mimi Syed

""Almost every day, you find out that one of your surgical colleagues, a nurse or a pediatrician here has had a relative brought in after being hit.""

Dr. Tom Potokar

"I pronounced more people dead there than I usually do in a year at my work as a trauma surgeon in California."

Dr. Feroze Sidhwa

"Operating on children who would say, I was lying on the ground after a bomb had dropped, and this quadcopter came down and hovered over me and shot me."

Prof. Nizam Mamode

"I can't leave if you're shooting at me."

Dr. Mohammed Abu Mughaisib

Anonymous doctor

"Another day of devastation here in Gaza. "