Letter from Dr. Ezzideen Shehab

Before introducing these testimonies, I felt compelled to read them myself.
I believed they would occupy an hour of my afternoon. Instead, they occupied four days of my life.
Not because they were long, but because after every few paragraphs, I discovered that I could no longer continue. I would close the document, sit in silence, and stare at nothing, until it slowly became clear that I was no longer reading another person’s memories. I had begun walking back into my own.

These pages bear different names. Different hospitals. Different dates. Different doctors.
And yet, as I continued reading, these differences dissolved until they no longer seemed to matter. The names changed. The suffering did not.
Every testimony ceased to feel like a quotation and became, instead, a memory I had forgotten belonged to me.
I was there. Not in imagination. Not in sympathy. I was there.

When Dr. Razan describes receiving the children of an entire family, still dressed in their Eid clothes, I was standing in the emergency department that day. I remember kneeling beside a little girl. There was blood beneath her hair.
A ribbon had been tied carefully around it that morning, perhaps by a mother who believed the greatest danger her daughter would face that day was that it might come undone while she played.
I searched for the wound beneath that ribbon. A scalpel would have freed it in a second.It would have been efficient. It would have been practical. But the child was awake.
She was frightened. She was looking directly into my eyes. And suddenly it seemed unbearable that, after everything war had already taken from her, the final gesture she received from another human hand should also be an act of cutting. So I asked a nurse to help me untie it instead. It was a very small kindness. War teaches us how enormous small kindnesses become.

When Dr. Tom writes, “The woman on the operating table is badly injured. Her husband and children were all killed. She doesn’t know yet.”
I know exactly which woman he means. I treated her too. She kept asking where her husband was. Where her children were.
Again and again she begged me to swear to God that they were alive.
And I did. I lied. I told her they were waiting outside.
There are lies born from cowardice. There are lies born from selfishness.
And then there are lies spoken because truth itself becomes too heavy for a human body already struggling to remain alive.
I did not lie because I believed my own words. I lied because every time she tried to rise from the stretcher, she bled more.
I lied because I needed her heart to beat for another minute. Another five minutes. Long enough for another bag of fluids.
Long enough for another chance.

Medicine teaches us that truth is sacred. That trust between doctor and patient is inviolable.
I believed that. I still believe it.
And yet war possesses a terrible power. It does not merely destroy buildings. It destroys the certainty with which good people once distinguished right from wrong.
There are moments when compassion begins speaking a language medicine never taught us.

As I continued reading these testimonies, one realization settled upon me with almost unbearable weight.
I had lived every one of them. Not always with the same people. Not always in the same hospital. Not always on the same day.
But somewhere, beneath another collapsing building, beneath another ambulance siren, beside another operating table, each of these moments had already happened to me.
Or perhaps that is not entirely true. Perhaps they had happened to all of us. Perhaps that is what war ultimately does. It steals individuality from suffering.
One child becomes every child. One mother becomes every mother. One physician becomes every physician who remained standing after everyone else had fallen.
Reading these pages no longer felt like reading a manuscript.
It felt like reopening a set of medical records written collectively by those who survived long enough to bear witness.

War has a frightening memory. It forgets names. It remembers patterns.
Different families. Different neighborhoods.
The same screams. The same impossible decisions. The same children. The same blood. The same silence that follows, a silence so complete that one almost begins to believe the world itself has stopped breathing. Again and again.
Until time ceases to resemble time at all. Until every yesterday resembles today, and every tomorrow appears already stained by the grief of yesterday. Then I reached one passage that refused to let me continue.

Dr. Mark writes, “I find myself wanting to cry constantly, but I just don’t have the time, moving from one person to another.”
I stopped reading. Not because those words surprised me.
Because I recognised them. I had once made the same promise to myself.
I would cry later. After the shift. After the ambulances stopped arriving. After the operating room became quiet. After the final patient.
But another ambulance always arrived. Another family entered. Another child needed chest compressions. Another mother needed someone to tell her that the son she had kissed goodbye that morning would never come home again.
So I postponed my grief. For another hour. Then another day. Then another month.

Human beings often imagine that grief disappears when it is ignored.
It does not. It waits. Patiently. Faithfully.
Like a companion sitting in a dark room, knowing that one day you will have no choice but to return.
Eventually, my shifts ended. I left the hospital. The sirens faded into the distance. The blood disappeared from my hands. But the tears never came. Even now I sometimes feel that there is a place inside me where mourning has remained suspended, as though some forgotten part of my soul is still waiting for permission to begin weeping.

Perhaps this is what trauma truly is. Not remembering too much. But becoming incapable of grieving what you remember.
Perhaps that is what these testimonies truly are. Not historical documents. Not medical reports. Not political statements.
They are fragments of one immense sorrow, carried by an entire generation of healthcare workers who learned how to stop bleeding but never learned how to stop carrying the faces of those they could not save.

If these pages ask anything of the reader, it is not pity. Pity fades too quickly. They ask for something more difficult. They ask to be remembered.
Because these stories do not belong only to Gaza. They belong to medicine.
They belong to every physician who has ever stood beside a patient and discovered that knowledge alone was not enough. They belong to every nurse who has held the trembling hand of a stranger.
And they belong to every human being who still believes that the worth of a life can never be measured by the place into which it was born.

If, after closing these pages, even one face remains with you, then perhaps those we could not save have not vanished entirely.
Perhaps memory is the final form of mercy still left to us.