“I have a cold. And in one hour, I’ll have finished a 24-hour shift, heartbroken again. I lost a cardiac patient because we had no medication.

“Another patient shot in the head, was left to die slowly because we had no ventilator. A child with a shattered skull and exposed brain matter just died in front of me. I also just found a kidney patient collapsed on the bedroom floor. He had a seizure due to brain damage because he has not had dialysis in three months. A diabetic man hadn’t eaten in four days. He cried when I asked why. I gave him fluids and some money to buy flour. I’m so sorry for the starving, for the children we couldn’t save, for the mothers, for the elderly, for the vulnerable. Not a single shift has passed without having me shattered.”

This is the reality in Gaza right now for the medical profession struggling to save an overwhelming amount of patients, not only from the bombings and gunshot wounds but now also from starvation. And the starvation has reached everyone, including the doctors themselves, some of whom have passed out on the floors of what remains of Gaza’s hospitals, then picked themselves up and gone back to work.

Those opening words belonged to Dr Ali Tahrawi, an emergency room doctor at Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah, Gaza.They were read aloud at a recent Washington, DC press conference by Dr Ashraf Abou El-Ezz, a physician from Indiana who knows he has all the resources he needs.

But somehow, the words are never loud enough and even though they were spoken in the shadow of the US Capitol building, those inside had already left for the summer recess. And in any case, most of them are not listening. Only US Representative Rashida Tlaib, the Michigan Democrat and the sole Palestinian American in Congress, remained behind to host the press conference.

“I dread the moment Hanan and Misk will ask me about their legs,” continued medical student Sharad Wertheimer, a member, like the others, of the US-based global network, Doctors Against Genocide, reading the words of Hala Sha’sha’aj, a 40-year old mother of five from Gaza city.

“What will I tell them? When I go to buy shoes for my children, what will I do when Hanan and Misk ask why I don’t buy them any? If they say, ‘I want to play’, ‘I want to dance’, ‘I want to ride a bike,’ what will I say to them? They lost their father, the love, compassion and security he gave them, and they also lost their legs, the ability to move and play. Everything beautiful in their lives is gone. Their childhood was stolen. What did they do to deserve such devastation?”

One after another, the doctors in their white coats and scrubs stepped forward to read the words of their colleagues, friends, relatives and people they don’t know at all, just human beings who matter and who are trapped in the concentration camps and free fire zones that Gaza has now become under the Israeli bombardment and forced starvation.

The doctors have heard these stories over and over for 22 months, during which time the situation has continued to get worse and the inaction by the US and other governments more criminal. But now, in the heat of late July, having lobbied members of Congress, protested, disrupted meetings and been arrested, they are running out of patience.

“We will not be polite”, warned John Reuwer, a retired ER doctor and member of DAG, who said he had been to five war zones but had never seen anything as bad as the current situation in Gaza. “We are here to say ‘no more’,” he said. “We will not stop. And we will not forget.”

And so the doctors continued to bear witness on behalf of the besieged and desperate Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.

“On the 28th of March, the soldiers called me and two other civilian prisoners, aged around 16 and 17, by name,” came the words of Dr Khalid Alseer, read by Dr Qurat-ul-ain Syedain. “It was night. They tied us very tightly at our wrists and ankles and put us in a military car. No one told us anything. We drove for around two hours into the hills. All the while they beat us, kicking us and humiliating us. They were laughing. I was trying to explain in English that the ties on my wrist were too tight, but they just said I was a doctor so I would be okay.

“At around 4am I heard one say in Arabic, ‘these three are to be hanged’. I thought it was the end. I was in pain. They had broken my ribs. Even when they said I was going to be hanged, I didn’t care. I just wanted it to end.” Dr. Alseer was eventually released in late September, and reunited with his parents for whom he is the sole provider.

“In mid-April 2024, Dr Adnan Al-Bursh arrived at Section 23 in Ofer Prison,” read Dr Roxana Samimi from an eyewitness account by a captive at the notorious detention centre in the occupied West Bank and as told to Sky News. “The prison guards brought Dr Adnan Al-Bursh into the section in a deplorable state. He had clearly been assaulted with injuries around his body. He was naked in the lower part of his body. The prison guards threw him in the middle of the yard and left him there. Dr Adnan Al-Bursh was unable to stand up. One of the prisoners helped him and accompanied him to one of the rooms. A few minutes later, prisoners were heard screaming from the room they went into, declaring Dr Adnan Al-Bursh was dead.”

How many more such testimonies need to be heard, the doctors wondered? What has happened to our humanity if we can live in a country that allows such a genocide to continue and our tax dollars to support it? Included in that so-called support is the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an Israel-US front that distributes aid as a form of Russian roulette, where young children are picked off by snipers, running barefoot to faster escape the bullets while trying to get food to feed their families.

“This is not a war, this is an extermination campaign,” said Dr Nidal Jboor, a Michigan internal medicine specialist and a co-founder of DAG. “From the concentration camps of the Holocaust, to the killing fields of Cambodia, to the concentration zones Israel is building across Gaza, and now the American-backed death distribution centres, the genocide is the same.”

“This institution is not moving with the majority of their constituencies,” said Tlaib, pointing to the Capitol dome behind her. “And it’s shameful because if they polled their constituents to ask if they wanted another dime spent on continuing to support another war crime in Gaza, they would tell you ‘hell no’,” she said. “We say enough is enough.”

Republished from CounterPunch, 26 July 2025

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.