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

"I say this as somebody who walked over the body of a dead child, while the mother was grieving, to treat another patient in Nasser hospital."

Dr. Thaer Ahmad

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

Dr. Feroze Sidhwa

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

Dr. Abdullah Ghali

"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

"These are not conditions for living."

Dr. Mimi Syed

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

Dr. Javid Abdelmoneim

"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

"The elderly was where my heart really sank."

Dr. Ana Jeelani

"As soon as her husband got home to be with the children while his wife was at work, on-call in the emergency department, the home was struck."

Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan

"There's nothing that you can do to replace the love of parents. You can bring their aunts, you can bring their uncles. There's absolutely nothing that we can do for them."

Dr. Aqsa Durrani

"The bottom line is this is a human rights issue and children are being murdered. It's got to stop. And we've got to stop supporting it."

Dr. Victoria Rose

"I went in about a week after the cease fire started. And it was, you know, it was, it was such a low bar to clear. It’s just to stop dropping bombs on, on everyone."

Dr. Adam Hamawy

"She reminded me of my own daughter."

Dr. Yipeng Ge

Dr. Yara Abou-Hamde

Dr. Dorotea Gucciardo

Dr. Rizwan Minhas

Dr. Ben Thompson

Dr. Noor Ul Amin

"I'm there looking at these two children, wondering what did they do?"

Dr. Mohammed Tahir

"A woman came in with asthma symptoms. She'd been cooking over a stove, breathing in toxic fumes because she was burning plastic."

Dr. Nahreen Ahmed

"The one playground that I saw on the second day or third day that I was there got bombed, 15 kids came in that day Dead on arrival."

Dr. Aziz Bhimani

"I find myself wanting to cry constantly, but I just don't have the time moving from one person to another."

Dr. Mark Brauner

"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

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

Dr. Samer Attar

"I'm not sure that we're going to be able to save her arm. "

Dr. Victoria Rose

"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

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

Dr. Feroze Sidhwa

Dr. Tammy Abughnaim

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

Dr. Mimi Syed

"The hemoglobin levels that are needed in order to donate blood safely are just not there. "

Anneliese Stephenson-Wenn

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

Dr. Tammy Abughnaim

"On one side you see the remains of Gaza and on the other side is farmland being watered, and it’s very dystopian. "

Dr. Victoria Rose

"However you describe the suffering and the insult in prison, you can never know the reality unless you lived through it."

Dr. Said Abdulrahman Maarouf

"They all came in dressed in their Id (holiday) clothing."

Dr. Razan al-Nahhas

"We were amputating limbs because we didn't have the capacity to preserve the limbs, and that's how we get the patients to survive."

Dr. Ahmed Mokhallalati

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

Dr. Thaer Ahmad

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