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

Dr. Razan al-Nahhas

"We're giving them Ibuprofen for an arm that's been blown off."

Monica Johnson

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

Dr. James Smith

"These kids are tiny, they are underweight and malnourished."

Dr. Victoria Rose

"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

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

Dr Andrew Ferguson

"I just want the killing to stop, and I want these kids to grow up with a chance in the future."

Dr. Mohammed Mostafa

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

Dr. Saira Hussain

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

Dr. Mhoira Leng

"We operated in unsterile settings that would’ve been unthinkable in the United States. We had limited access to critical medical equipment."

Dr. Irfan Galaria

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

Dr. Mark Brauner

"There were no cardiac surgeons at the hospital, so it fell to me to lead the operation."

Dr. Khaled Dawas

Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan

Dr. Thaer Ahmad

"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

"I didn't do much, I just held his hand and I wiped his head."

Dr. Mohammed Tahir

"These are not conditions for living."

Dr. Mimi Syed

"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

"Leaving to seek treatment for your child [...] versus leaving your family behind and knowing that you may never see them again."

Dr. Mohammed Tahir

"Do we really call this a ceasefire?"

Dr. Morten Rostrup

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

Dr. Nick Maynard

"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

"Bones are not reknitting back together, wounds are just not healing here because you need to have protein. you have to have stable nutrition."

Andee Clark Vaughan

"The locals, when I talk to them, they're always very hopeful and strong and resilient."

Dr. Mimi Syed

"Now I understand why all of these children come into the emergency department shivering."

Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan

Arwa Damon

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

Dr. Mimi Syed

"We are haunted by painful memories that are impossible to forget."

Faress Arafat

"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

"There was almost daily torture in the Israeli prisons"

Dr. Mohammed Abu Salmiya

"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

"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

"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

"Two days of horror. We are in a besieged Nasser hospital"

Dr. Ahmed Moghrabi

"You can’t confuse a two-year-old for a combatant."

Dr. Adam Hamawy

"Every space that once promised safety has been turned to dust."

Dr. Ezzideen shehab

"This kid was 6 years old."

Dr. Mark Perlmutter

"He told me confess and we will stop torturing you."

Walid Khalili

"This is worse than anything I’ve ever seen. The scale of destruction is something that I couldn’t even comprehend before I got here. "