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nasser hospital
The Face of the Other in Gaza
I found faces, hundreds of them, of children, mothers, teachers, tired men with empty pockets and broken sandals. Each looked directly into my eyes and asked, without accusation or anger: Are you still human?
Aug 18, 2025
Nothing prepared me for Gaza.
As a US physician trained in emergency medicine, I’ve spent decades in trauma bays across the United States, watching lives come undone. I’ve worked in rural hospitals where people arrived too late and urban trauma centers where they came too often. I’ve seen the machinery of US healthcare grind the spirit out of caregivers and patients alike.
But nothing prepared me for the weeks I spent volunteering at a hospital in Gaza. Nothing prepared me for the faces.
Not the statistics. Not the headlines. Not even 40 years of watching the Israeli occupation strangle Palestinian life with checkpoints, silence, and administrative cruelty.
No one should need more proof to feel the inhuman precision with which children are being targeted in Gaza, crushed not by chance, but by design.
When I arrived at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, I thought I might be helpful. I had skills, experience, knowledge. But I found something else entirely: a theology of suffering, a human Blue Mosque, a Hagia Sophia built of tarps and rebar and ash. A sacred geometry laid down in grief.
A place where stones have been replaced by the soft bones of children, and the call to prayer is now the wail of a mother whose baby was just wrapped in a death shroud. Gaza is not rubble; it is a broken house of God, a mosque of flesh and resilience, where every injured child is a mihrab pointing them back to their humanity.
I found faces, hundreds of them, of children, mothers, teachers, tired men with empty pockets and broken sandals. Each looked directly into my eyes and asked, without accusation or anger: Are you still human?
The French Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas wrote that “the face of the Other” is the foundation of ethics. Not a metaphorical face, but the literal presence of another human, staring at you in their radical vulnerability. Not asking for anything. Just being, and in that being, commanding you: Thou shalt not kill. And thou art responsible.
That’s Gaza. It is the face of the Other turned toward us. We, the West, armchair allies, media skeptics, Israel Defense Forces apologists, and progressive handwringers alike, are being looked at.
And we are failing.
There is no universe, no scripture, no coda, no strand of human DNA where it is natural to shoot children in the back of the head as they carry sacks of flour. There is no ethical system, no wartime doctrine, no security calculus in which a mother killed while reaching for fava beans can be explained away without doing violence to language itself.
What is happening in Gaza is not war or strategy or self-defense. It is the ritualized and systematic destruction of the most vulnerable, performed in broad daylight under the collapsing architecture of international law.
It is unnatural. Not just wrong, not just cruel, but a rupture in the moral biology of our species. It offends the fundamental contract of being alive. It is a humiliation of biology and a heresy against physics. It is unnatural, like fission: a tearing apart of what was never meant to be touched. It belongs to the stars, to the great incomprehensibility, to cataclysm, to apocalypse. It does not belong on Earth, and never in the body of a child.
There is a room in the emergency department at Nasser Hospital with six trauma bays. As in any hospital, there are monitors and equipment. But what defines the room is the floor: a mosaic of congealed, scrubbed, and recongealed blood. Every 20 minutes, a crew enters the stage, they pick up debris, tissue, IV tubing, and gauze, then throw water across the floor. With long squeegees, they push the red tide into the drain. It is mechanical, but also meticulous and highly orchestrated. Still, it cannot erase the smell. Or the taste of blood in the air. Or the faces.
A 14-year-old child came in while I was there. She was brought from Mawasi, where the “safe zone” is nothing but coordinates agreed upon by artillery software. My fellow US physician had passed a tent school in Mawasi earlier, likely the same kind of school where my patient studied: a school that had been turned inside out by a drone toting a high-velocity rifle.
The girl’s shoulder was gone. Not dislocated. Not fractured. Gone. Replaced by shredded muscle and smoke and dirt. Her dark eyes were open. She was conscious. Her mouth moved, but she did not speak. That is Levinas’ face: the face that makes no demand but reveals everything.
The children killed while retrieving food were not on a battlefield. They were in the ruins of a society that has been deliberately starved. This is not collateral damage. This is intentional. It is the predictable outcome of a siege that has weaponized hunger and then punished the hungry for trying to survive it.
What makes it more obscene is the silence following each killing. The Western governments that mouth the words “civilian casualties” like they are a clerical error. The media that speak of “complexities” and “context,” as if complexity justifies targeting starving people and context renders a dead toddler’s face invisible. The theological contortionists who try to fit this into some redemptive historical arc, as if a baby’s flesh split open by shrapnel is somehow part of prophecy.
It is not. It is a desecration of everything sacred. And it is being done with the money, silence, and diplomatic cover of the so-called civilized world.
I did not go to Gaza to be a hero. I went because I’ve watched the slow, humiliating collapse of US medicine, where we document more than we listen, discharge patients without follow-up, fight insurance companies harder than sepsis. I went to remember what it means to be a physician, not a provider or a billing unit. Someone who kneels by a body and stays.
And here’s what I found. In Gaza, where there are no electronic medical records, no scribes, no Joint Commission audits, no Press Ganey scores to measure patients’ experience, I found something we have lost: time. Not time in the capitalist sense of billable hours or productivity, but sacred time, shared time, human time. In Gaza, physicians sit with people. They bear witness. Sometimes they fix them. Sometimes they just keep the face of the human being before them from being alone.
I also found a clarity of purpose. In Gaza, the distance between patient and physician collapses. There is no buffer, no euphemism, no illusion. Physicians get their hands bloody and hold patients as they die. And they do it without glory, recognition, or compensation.
They do it, and I did it, because the face is looking at us. Because it is not a child from Gaza. It is a child. Period.
For reasons rooted in privilege, the words of white US witnesses seem to carry more weight. But some truths are self-evident. No one should need more proof to feel the inhuman precision with which children are being targeted in Gaza, crushed not by chance, but by design.
During my stay, I thought often of my children back home. Although they are adults, I missed them with an ache that broke open every time I heard a child cry.
Before I went, I recorded a video in case I didn’t return. I wasn’t trying to inspire them or ask them to follow; I just needed to say the truth. The world is on fire in some places, and sometimes I feel I have to move toward it. Because if I don’t, something in me goes quiet and stays quiet. Silence doesn’t belong in Gaza. Not now.
So I say clearly: It is unnatural to kill children for being hungry. It is unnatural to shoot a girl in the spine because she walked near a food truck. It is unnatural to erase a family for the crime of standing in line for aid.
And if we allow that to become natural, if we flinch and say nothing, we are no longer witnesses; we are participants. And we will deserve the severity of history’s judgment.
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Worse Than Fiction: Responding to a Mass Casualty Event in Gaza
On the television show The Pitt, the fictional “never-ending” mass casualty scene featured 112 patients. We saw nearly four times that number in a single afternoon.
Aug 07, 2025
On Tuesday, June 17, the staff at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, Gaza, experienced a mass casualty event that began at around 9:00 am in the morning and didn’t stop until nearly 6 in the afternoon. It wasn’t one incident. It was a continuous flood of broken, bleeding, dying human beings.
By the end of the day, we had seen over 400 patients. Around 250 were critically injured. Ninety died in the resuscitation room, many on the floor.
I’m a doctor and I was in Gaza as a volunteer with an organization called Rahma Worldwide. Before Gaza, I had never worked a true mass casualty. The only ones I’d ever experienced were at Nasser itself in the days leading up to this one, trauma surges that already felt unbearable. But this was different. This was so much more. This wasn’t a surge. This was a human tide.
To put it into perspective, on the television show The Pitt, the fictional “never-ending” mass casualty scene featured 112 patients. We saw nearly four times that number in a single afternoon. And every one of them was real. Every injury was real. Every death was real.
It wasn’t an unfortunate consequence of war. It was the logical outcome of a system that has decided some lives are worth less than others.
Moreover, these weren’t random wartime injuries. This was the result of deliberate, targeted violence. People were shot while waiting for food at Gaza Humanitarian Foundation distribution points. Tanks opened fire on crowds. Families just trying to survive were torn apart by weapons never meant for civilians. Some of the bodies came to us in pieces. Many had no names.
Inside Nasser’s emergency department, the conditions were beyond description. Patients were laid on top of each other, not because of neglect or lack of care, but because there was simply no space left. The floor became our only option. Blood from multiple patients pooled across the tile, thick and dark, mixing with dust and sand and bits of shrapnel. I remember crouching over one patient while reaching to clamp another’s bleeding artery. There was nowhere to move without stepping in blood.
At one point, I swung around quickly trying not to slip, and my elbow struck one of the nurses directly in the face. She took two steps back, lifted her head, and just smiled at me and moved on. That was the kind of day it was. That’s the kind of people I worked with.
The injuries were horrific. Gunshots to the chest, neck, and face. Limbs blasted off. Pregnant women with abdominal wounds and no fetal heart tones. Toddlers with missing eyes, fractured skulls, or no pulse at all. We intubated and transfused nonstop. Massive transfusion protocols ran dry. Every resource was pushed past its limit.
And still, the staff kept working.
Local emergency physicians, residents, and medical students. International volunteers like me, working through organizations like Rahma Worldwide and Glia. And above all, the nurses. These nurses, many unpaid and all overworked, showed up anyway. They stood in the blood and fire and brought order to hell. They triaged, charted, held hands, cleaned wounds, comforted children, and kept going long after the rest of us were spent.
The surgical teams on the floor above us moved at a nearly impossible pace. One after another, they attended to the worst of the worst casualties and tried to save them. When the day finally slowed, many of the doctors rinsed off what they could, stepped over rubble, and walked back to their tents to sleep for a few hours. Then they came back a few hours later to do it again.
This is not medicine. This is something entirely different. It is not war in the way most people think of war. It is something colder. It is targeted, purposeful, mechanized human erasure.
What happened at Nasser Hospital that day in June was not an accident. It wasn’t an unfortunate consequence of war. It was the logical outcome of a system that has decided some lives are worth less than others. The world needs to stop pretending this is too complicated to understand.
The Pitt is fictional. Gaza is not.
Let’s stop the genocide. Let’s stop the funding to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) using the only recognized and well established U.S. law designed to do this: the Leahy Law. To sign the petition go to https://sign.moveon.org/p/LeahyReviewNow. For more background information go to www.LeahyReviewNow.org.
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'The Never-Ending Hunger Games of Gaza': IDF Kills 70+ Palestinians Trying to Get Food Aid
"It was a massacre," said one witness, adding that Israeli troops continued firing on people as they fled.
Jun 17, 2025
With the world's eyes on the escalating Israel-Iran conflict, the Israel Defense Forces on Tuesday killed at least dozens of people waiting for food trucks in the Gaza Strip, yet another IDF massacre of starving Palestinians seeking humanitarian aid.
Eyewitnesses told journalists that while Palestinians were gathered on a route used by humanitarian assistance trucks in Khan Younis, Israeli forces conducted an airstrike on a nearby home and then targeted the crowd with gun and tank fire.
The Gaza Health Ministry and Nasser Hospital initially confirmed that more than 50 people were dead and over 200 others were wounded. Al Jazeera later reported that the ministry said the death toll had risen beyond 70.
People in the crowd were "blown to pieces, body parts were scattered all over the place," witness Saeed Abu Lebda told the outlet. "The number of victims is way more than those brought to the hospital. But no one could reach them to provide help."
At Nasser Hospital, a witness named Alaa recalled to Reuters that "all of a sudden, they let us move forward and made everyone gather, and then shells started falling, tank shells."
"No one is looking at these people with mercy," Alaa added. "The people are dying, they are being torn apart, to get food for their children. Look at these people, all these people are torn to get flour to feed their children."
As The Associated Press reported:
Yousef Nofal, an eyewitness, said he saw many people motionless and bleeding on the ground after Israeli forces opened fire. "It was a massacre," he said, adding that the soldiers continued firing on people as they fled from the area.
Mohammed Abu Qeshfa said he heard a loud explosion followed by heavy gunfire and tank shelling. "I survived by a miracle," he said.
"A witness who spoke with Haaretz said that the Palestinians were hit in an area that the army considers an active combat zone, and they were not in the vicinity of an established distribution center nearby," according to the Israeli newspaper.
The Israel Defense Forces said in a statement that "earlier today, a gathering was identified adjacent to an aid distribution truck that got stuck in the area of Khan Younis, and in proximity to IDF troops operating in the area."
"The IDF is aware of reports regarding a number of injured individuals from IDF fire following the crowd's approach. The details of the incident are under review," the Israeli military continued. "The IDF regrets any harm to uninvolved individuals and operates to minimize harm as much as possible to them while maintaining the safety of our troops."
The Gaza Health Ministry said Monday that since the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack, the Israeli assault on the Palestinian enclave had killed at least 55,432 people, with thousands more missing in rubble and presumed dead.
Over the past 20 months, the IDF has repeatedly slaughtered Palestinians trying to access food assistance, including at hubs recently set up by the U.S.- and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) following an Israeli blockade on aid.
The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor said in a lengthy Tuesday statement that GHF "is directly responsible for the escalating Israeli crimes against starved Palestinian civilians near aid distribution points in central and southern Gaza."
"The foundation's operational model involves luring civilians to specific locations coordinated with the Israeli army, where they are subjected to killing, injury, and cruel and degrading treatment," Euro-Med Monitor said. "These points have effectively become death traps used as tools in Israel's ongoing genocide against the Palestinian population for over 20 months."
The monitor called for independent international investigations into the Tuesday killings and GHF's role "in facilitating and executing serious crimes committed against Palestinian civilians," as well as a halt on all financial or logistical support to the foundation, criminal probes against all individuals affiliated with it, and civil lawsuits for implicated entities and individuals.
"Euro-Med Monitor also calls on all states, individually and collectively, to uphold their legal obligations and take urgent action to stop the ongoing genocide in Gaza in all its forms," the group added. "Finally, Euro-Med Monitor urges the international community to impose economic, diplomatic, and military sanctions on Israel in response to its systematic and grave violations of international law."
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