A Doctor on What He Saw in Gaza

“The destruction I saw there was astonishing.” A detailed account from a doctor who, during the brief ceasefire, spent nine days treating patients and sleeping in the partial ruins of a hospital in Gaza. Plus:

Clayton Dalton
Dalton is an E.R. doctor who writes about health and medicine.

For a short while earlier this year, an end to the conflict in Gaza seemed to be in sight. On January 15th, Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire that was meant to lead to peace. The death toll among Israelis, including hostages, was more than twelve hundred; the death toll in Gaza was approaching fifty thousand. A reprieve meant that displaced families could return to their homes—or what was left of them. A ravaged health-care system, no longer inundated with trauma patients from relentless air strikes, could turn to care that had been deferred or delayed. And Palestinians could begin the slow process of rebuilding.

Two weeks later, I entered Gaza as part of a medical-aid mission to help Gaza’s exhausted health-care workers care for patients. The destruction I saw there was astonishing. Nearly every structure had been damaged in some way, if not completely destroyed. Israeli air strikes and ground operations had reduced whole blocks of residential neighborhoods to piles of shattered concrete and rebar. I spent most of my time at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, whose buildings had been raked by shrapnel; we slept on mattresses on the ground in what was once the obstetrics building, and helped wherever we could. Most patients were recovering from injuries sustained before the ceasefire, but sometimes people would arrive after being injured when unexploded bombs had detonated, or damaged buildings had collapsed on them.

I was also able to visit hospitals in northern Gaza that few outsiders have been able to reach. Although protected by international humanitarian law, these facilities had not been spared; Israel had justified strikes by arguing that Hamas was operating within the health-care system. Several were in ruins, and were unlikely to ever again receive patients. I was disturbed to see hospitals that had been consumed by flames, and lifesaving medical equipment that had been destroyed by bullets. I saw charred operating rooms and maternity wards, and wrecked dialysis machines and neonatal incubators. Everywhere I went, Palestinians were trying to reassemble their lives. People gathered rubble into piles, and I saw a man hammering out twisted sheets of metal, to reuse them. But the mood remained grim, and many I spoke with were wary of what the future held. I asked a medical student whether things had improved after the ceasefire. “Not at all,” he replied. “There is another war now—a war for survival.”

In March, after I had returned to the U.S., Israel abruptly resumed its bombing campaign in an effort to pressure Hamas to accept revised ceasefire terms. More than sixteen hundred Palestinians have been killed in the renewed hostilities. Medical supplies, which had begun flowing across the border during the ceasefire, were cut off. Missiles struck multiple hospitals that I had visited. Another medical student I had met in the north texted me to say that the hospitals there were barely functioning, with very limited supplies and not enough staff. “The pressure on the ER is overwhelming,” he wrote. “Every day, we face impossible choices.” In the war for survival, Palestinians were losing ground once again.

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