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.

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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.

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

Dr. Mhoira Leng

Testimonies

About the archive of testimonies

Behind the Testimonies

International Doctors

Gaza Healthcare Workers

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

Dr. Mhoira Leng

"I've done more amputations, and seen more traumatic amputations of children's, than I've seen during my entire career in the last two weeks."

Dr. Adam Hamawy

"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

"Amid all this horror, there were moments of light. We took great joy seeing Juri’s personality resurface once her sepsis resolved."

Dr. Feroze Sidhwa

Dr. Mark Perlmutter

"Every corridor in the hospital had half the width occupied by mattresses on the floor with IDPs sitting and lying – children, men and women of all ages."

Dr. Amer Shoaib

"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

"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

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

Dr. Nick Maynard

""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

"They don't let journalists enter, and they kill the Gazan journalists who are there, so the doctors who come there reveal the truth to the world."

Dr. Mimi Syed

"I recall his vacant stare and his soft voice whispering into my ear. I wish I had died with them. "

Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan

"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

"A seven-month-old baby lies in our paediatric intensive care unit, so tiny and malnourished that I initially mistook her for a newborn."

Dr. Nick Maynard

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

Dr. Abdullah Ghali

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

Dr. Mohammed Tahir

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

Dr. Mohammed Mostafa

"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."

Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan

"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

"Every day I saw babies die."

99 American Medical Professionals

"Any kind of disability in Gaza is a death sentence."

Dr. Yasser Khan

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

Dr. Mark Brauner

"Many children would not speak for days, even with their family at bedside. One child would not accept a gift I brought of a little plastic car, because she did not want to touch or talk to anyone but her father."

Dr. Feroze Sidhwa

"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

"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

"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

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

152 American Medical Professionals

"We need electronic beds, we need assistive devices for patients; currently we are releasing patients who need devises because we are unable to provide these to them."

Dr. Faiza Barqan

"Beyond dystopian. This is the most horrific thing that most of us have ever witnessed or followed in our lifetimes. "

Dr. James Smith

"I have nightmares of what I witnessed when I sleep."

Munther Abed

"I said, okay, is there any way of retrieving the arm? And he was a bit shocked. I said, no, I mean, I'm serious. Is there a way of retrieving the arm? And he said, okay. "

Dr. Mohammed Tahir

"We were treating our own people, children, mothers, classmates, and the number of injured weighs heavily on us."

Dr. Ezz Lulu

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

Dr. Victoria Rose

"Mom, can we leave Gaza now? I really just want to live."

Dr. Ruba

"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

"At hospital, I found medical staff on the floor naked handcuffed and blindfolded"

Dr. Ahmed Abu Sobha

"The elderly was where my heart really sank."