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

"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

"I saw that love for life came under attack, specifically trying to break the will of the people in Gaza. "

Dr. Thaer Ahmad

rajaa musleh

"Despite everything that had happened to him, he was so keen to tell his story"

Dr Andrew Ferguson

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

Dr. Feroze Sidhwa

"I didn’t know what to do. Do I yell or cry or carry my daughter? "

Dr. Mimi Syed

Dr. Tammy Abughnaim

Dr. Mark Perlmutter

Dr. Ayaz Pathan

Dr. Nabeel Rana

Dr. Mohammed Adeel Khaleel

Dr. Yassar Arain

Miranda Cleland

Charles Blaha

"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's no triage, people are grabbing your shoulder left and right, please see my daughter, please see my mum."

Dr. Mohammed Mostafa

"I remember the anesthesia doctor on the phone begging the blood bank for blood."

Dr. Samer Attar

""They both just had terrible brain injuries. ... So I had to just tell their families, I just had to pick them up and say, 'You know, they're going to die, there's nothing I can do about that.'""

Dr. Mark Perlmutter

Dr. Feroze Sidhwa

"The surgeon across from me just, a very stoic, unemotional, strong, resilient surgeon just broke down in tears."

Dr. Samer Attar

"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

"The Israelis shot a GPS-guided bomb on the house where a British charity medical team was staying. "

Dr. Amer Shoaib

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

Dr. Mimi Syed

"This kid was 6 years old."

Dr. Mark Perlmutter

"People feel that their humanity is not recognized. People feel that they're abandoned and left to the slaughter."

Dr. Javid Abdelmoneim

"A part of me just wanted him to die peacefully."

Dr. Sanjay Adusumilli

"My patients were six-year-olds with shrapnels in their heart and bullets in their brains, and pregnant women."

Dr. Feroze Sidhwa

"Trying to explain to a little boy that you are using a saw to cut through his bone."

Dr. Abdullah Ghali

"Just imagine the healthcare workers doing these procedures without anesthetic"

Dr. Mhoira Leng

" They have never seen with their own eyes what is going on, heard the screams, smelt the rotting flesh, shuddered from the constant bombardment. "

Dr. Tom Potokar

"His mother tells al-Farra that she tried to breastfeed him but didn't have enough milk. When formula became too expensive, she started to feed him starch dissolved in water."

Dr. Ahmad Al Farra

"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

"In an explosion when a blast goes off, everything around you gets weaponized."

Dr. Victoria Rose

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

Dr. Feroze Sidhwa

Dr. Tammy Abughnaim

"Mothers can't even breastfeed because they are so malnourished."

Dr. Nick Maynard

"Midwives offer a ray of hope amid horror, as harsh winter grips Gaza."

Nabila Masaoud

"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

"They look at me with eyes that ask for comfort, not medicine."

Dr. Ahmed Seyam

"In the ER there, ventilators were so scarce that if there was a 70-year-old and a 20-year-old both requiring one, we had to decide who gets it. "

Dr. Aziz Rahman

"At one point, among doctors and nurses, the only topic of conversation in the hospital was food, and the desperate hunt for it. "Starving doctors were treating malnutrition," [...] And the injured just kept coming."

Dr. Mohammed Abu Mughaisib

"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