In 2025, in the modern world where there is access to everything, we – Israeli medical personnel – do not have access to Gaza. We cannot cross the border to help, cannot receive patients from there and treat them, and journalists are forbidden to enter and show us what is really happening. In December of 2023 Dr. David Hassan was among the first foreign doctors to enter Gaza and began sending documentation out to the wider world. Since then, we have in our hands dozens of testimonies from foreign medical teams about the scale of the humanitarian disaster and the destruction of the health system in Gaza. Many doctors who were there reported that more than their medical work and the attempts to save lives in impossible situations, they felt that their main purpose was documentation.

These testimonies teach us about the shortage of medical supplies: “We had operations being done with no sterile gloves, no sterile drapes… I did amputations on people who just had to take paracetamol after the operation as pain relief”, and about the shortage of food: “There is no nutrition in the hospital to give the adults. There’s no intravenous nutrition. There’s virtually no liquid enteral nutrition to go into feeding tubes (direct nutrition into the intestine). They are totally reliant on their families bringing in feed, and many of them are starving themselves. They can’t get any feed to bring into their relatives.”

They teach us about unreasonable conditions for medical work: “One of my colleagues took maggots out of a child’s throat in intensive care. There were flies in the operating theatre landing in the wounds,” “The capacity of the hospital was supposed to be between 115 to 200 people and there were 700 patients in that hospital.”

The medical teams testify about a shortage of skilled medical staff because “so many medical staff have been detained, been killed, some have left when they were able to leave,” and about local staff forced to care for their own family members who were brought to the hospital dying or dead.

They teach us about the loss of humanity. About dying children whose entire families were killed, and only the foreign staff were there to hold their bodies, their hands, press on a bleeding wound, or say a few comforting words.

They teach us about the suicidal thoughts of children who lost their whole world and family in bombings: “I recall his vacant stare and his soft voice whispering into my ear. I wish I had died with them. Everyone I love is in heaven. I don’t want to be here anymore,” and about the population’s psychological trauma, for which there is no time to treat: “there’s no opportunity to deal with psychological, psychiatric trauma when we’re still dealing with the physical trauma, the lack of surviving today, finding clean water, finding enough medication to survive today.”

They testify us about a deliberate policy of stopping food and supplies: “There had been no (baby) formula feed allowed into Gaza since the last ceasefire, for several months. And some American doctors I know, who I was working with, tried to bring formula feed into Gaza, and all the cartons of formula feed were confiscated by the Israeli border guards”.

In the modern medical system every patient has an electronic medical record on a computer. In Gaza there is no medical documentation: “The emergency department is chaos most of the time. There’s no, I mean, there are no medical notes anymore. You know, there’ll be little scraps of literally little scraps of paper,” and therefore the statistical analysis of injuries, illnesses and deaths is a challenging process. We only have estimates from the Palestinian Ministry of Health, which are certainly underestimates, compared to the estimates of the foreign doctors, some of whom estimated the number of dead to be three to four times higher than existing estimates, and up to 10% of the Strip’s population.

Finally, after reading page after page of pure human suffering intentionally inflicted by people, one understands what Dr. Tania Haj Hassan, a pediatric intensive care physician, said: “How can we even begin to articulate what we have seen? I remember the silence of the woman brought into the hospital injured. Staring blankly and unable to speak. She had given birth one week earlier. She couldn’t find her seven-day old baby. Both her baby and her toddler were trapped under the rubble. There are no words that can adequately convey the pain and depravity of this aggression.”

I agree. There are no words that can describe what is happening in Gaza. But only more and more words that try to do so will allow us to know and understand, and then to act against the genocide that is being carried out near to us and in our name.