So I will just read my testimony and you can see for yourself. I’m Dr. Mimi Sayed. I’m a board-certified emergency medicine physician. And I’ve been to Gaza twice. I went last year in August for a month in Nasser Hospital. And then I went again in December to Al-Aqsa Hospital again for four weeks. I stand before you today not just as a physician but as a mother and a human being who bears the truths that have been etched into my soul during my time in Gaza. I have seen the unthinkable, the inhumane, and the utterly heart-wrenching. The children of Gaza with their eyes wide open and full of innocence have been subjected to horrors that no child should ever face. I have seen them murdered, starved, and denied the most basic of human rights. Their cries for help echo in my mind a haunting symphony of suffering that I cannot escape. The patients I treated in Gaza were the majority children under the age of 12. On my first trip to Gaza in August, I have at least 18 documented cases of children who arrived in my emergency department with bullets to the head or the chest. And by witnesses reported to be shot by snipers or quadcopters. I have seen more brain matter out of skulls of small children due to shrapnel injuries that I ever thought possible in my entire lifetime. I will never forget the image of parents bringing their dead children wrapped in blankets and laying them on the floor so we could check for a pulse before pronouncing them all dead. This was a daily routine in Gaza, multiple times a day. The long line to the morgue where family members would wait for their loved ones so they could bury them with some shred of dignity will always be an un-forgotten memory for me. Even when we did save some children from the jaws of death their survival is at the mercy of the Israeli military’s next air strike or food deprivation.
On my second trip in December during a mass casualty incident I recall an eight-year-old little girl named Allah. She arrived in an ambulance to Nasser hospital with her father next to her. She was hit by a piece of shrapnel that opened her skull to expose half of her brain. Even though she was still moving slightly given her devastating injury the plan was to let her die because the rate of survival was very low for her. However, when I looked into the eyes of her father, I could not allow her to die without at least trying to stabilize her for further treatment. I imagined my own eight-year-old daughter laying there. I immediately secured her airway with a laryngeoscope I had to smuggle in because I wasn’t allowed to bring it in by these Israeli military. By some miracle I was able to get her to surgery and three weeks later she was talking, reading and walking and even saying “shukran doktora, ana bikhayr” (thank you, I am well) three weeks later. Although I was able to help this little girl she continues to have the threat of death looming over her at all times. She needs medical evacuation because there’s only a skin flap covering her brain. She’s at risk for infection, malnourishment and death that was created by the Israeli government.
In December I treated a 29-year-old woman arrived at our hospital at Al-Alaqsa with three small children next to her on the cot. She was bleeding profusely from an overgrown breast tumor, a condition that was curable with timely chemotherapy and surgery. It started off at the size of an olive in her breast. Prior to October 7th she could have received this life-saving treatment in Gaza. But now this was impossible. She was denied evacuation even though she was approved by WHO. She was denied four times by the Israeli government for medical evacuation. By the time she reached me there was nothing I could do to stabilize her. She came in bleeding from her breast tumor so highly vascularized. I could only give her two units of blood. A temporary reprieve before she inevitably bled out in front of her three children on the cot. My colleagues later notified me that she had passed. This tragedy is not an isolated incident.