‘They had not seen an apple for seven months’

Here are their stories in their own words:

Dr Jeremy Hickey

Dr Jeremy Hickey, an anaesthetist from Perth, Australia, travelled to Gaza as part of a team of surgeons, physicians, and other sub-specialties in June and is preparing to return in the coming weeks.

“In the lead up to going, you can see all over social media, there are videos of death, injuries, there’s all this sort of visual stimuli and you can soak up as much as you want to, so I sort of prepared myself somewhat in that regard.

“But it’s when you go and you hear when a family member comes in and one of the staff says: ‘I’m sorry, but your family members died’, and just the raw human emotion that just erupts from these people is like nothing...It’s one thing to hear it once, but then when you hear this on repeat, it’s something you can’t become immune to. Every time you hear that; the distress and just the sheer horror in someone’s cry or scream, or, you know, pleading to have their family member back, or for the bombing to stop or for this suffering to end, it just sends chills through you. It reminds you of how relentless and unforgiving all of this onslaught and genocide is.

“I can’t impress enough, just how devastating in every regard this is.

“It’s full sensory experience. There’s obviously the sights; it’s busy, there’s people everywhere, there’s bodily fluids everywhere. There’s the sounds not just within the hospital itself, but the sounds of drones flying around is constant, then there’s the intermittent booms and bangs and shaking of walls. 

"There’s the sounds of people screaming because there’s not enough things like basic pain relief to help these people, before, after, during surgeries, or if they’ve sustained injuries.

“There’s the smells, they are quite confronting at times as well. Hospitals are the safest places for people to congregate, and so when you’ve got masses of people living in and around the hospital complex, the infrastructure wasn’t built to support that number of people, so things like sewage management become overwhelmed very quickly.

It’s a very emotional experience because you are seeing a lot of innocent people, a lot of women and children who are suffering, who are being targeted

"It’s overwhelming, but you’ve got no choice but to get on with it. It’s, it is really hard to describe it. It’s just, it’s a full sensory overload.

“People there are suffering, innocent people are suffering in ways that you can’t imagine, in ways that the current news and images and videos that come out don’t do it justice. And it’s not that they have a couple of bad days and then things are OK, this is their life for nearly a year now. This is pure suffering and heartache and destruction, and it just feels like it’s never-ending.

"What the people want more than anything is they want the war to stop, and they want to have their freedom, they want their opportunity to live their own lives and determine their own futures.

“I think it comes down to one word: Ceasefire. That’s the bottom line.”

Dr Mohammed Tahir

Dr Mohammed Tahir, an orthopaedic and peripheral nerve surgeon from London has been to Gaza twice since October 7, carrying out 290 surgeries over 59 days during his second mission alone.

“Oftentimes you hear a loud boom in the background, and then cars start to arrive at the hospital, there is the sound of sirens, and you hear the sound of panic and screaming, and then you’re told there’s casualties, for example, or a multiple casualty incident.

"Sometimes you would go to the ER [emergency room], although I’m primarily based in the OR [operating room], but we would run to the ER to offer support there, because you have so many people coming in at a single point in time, they need support. You obviously intervene there to try to save lives. Sometimes you take people to the OR immediately, and then just stay in the OR for the remainder of the day, and then sometimes you have to run back to the ER and so on, so forth.

“Other days you could be waking up very sleep deprived from the day before, because we often finish 3am, 4am, 5am, sometimes 6am. You wake up extremely sleep deprived, and you go to the OR and you just start dealing with the patients that you have to deal with.

“That could be a mixture of patients that have been neglected, who have long standing injuries — you have to remember it’s not just people get attacked today that need help, it’s all those over the last 11 months. You have a sea of people who are maimed, who are disabled, or bedridden because of huge wounds or they are paralysed. You’re trying to treat those patients, at the same time you have the constant influx of major trauma.

“It’s non-stop, it’s constant, it’s draining, mainly emotionally and spiritually, because you just you see all this human suffering.

“The north [of Palestine] is completely blockaded. The north has no food, no veg, no chicken. Everything was canned food delivered through food aid programs.

“We took fruit to the north, and I met the local staff on day one of operating in the northern hospital, and I was just so taken aback by the fact that they didn’t have this in the north.

“So I went upstairs and told my team: ‘I’m raiding our apples’. I took some apples, I went downstairs, and I presented the apples to the team, and they were so overjoyed, they fell back over themselves laughing and jumping because they had not seen an apple for seven months at that point. So the north is starved.

“I think we drew our strength from our local Palestinian colleagues, the doctors, the nurses, the healthcare workers, even the medical students were phenomenal. The patients themselves, which display such a beautiful embodiment of patience and faith was so powerful for us to witness firsthand.

“It gives you strength, so we have strength from them. But it’s very upsetting. It’s very emotionally upsetting to see a very beautiful, wonderful people being subjected to such an onslaught and unrelenting killing.”

Dr Mosab Nasser 

As a Palestinian living in the US, Dr Mosab Nasser, co-founder of FAJR Scientific, has visited Gaza many times, most recently in May when he was forced to evacuate the safe house he was staying in with medics volunteering in Rafah.

“I think Gaza is, in my view, a game changer. What has happened in Gaza has changed the perspective of people around the world of so many things, primarily the definition of human rights and who qualifies as a human. It has also opened the door to those who can break the law, to break the law. Gaza might be the beginning, but definitely not the end.

“Gaza is a paradigm shift so many ways. The human rights violations that we’ve seen in Gaza will actually allow other countries to do this.

“So for those marching on the streets, in my view, part of it is for Gaza, but a big part of it is for the world. If you allow such things to happen with impunity, without any consequences, then you should be ready for the consequences.

“You see on social media, ‘Gaza before and after’. When you look at it before, it looks beautiful.

“Yes, there was life, there were restaurants, people, but underneath all that, there was tremendous suffering.

“There was a blockade for 17 years, everything was being monitored, drones did not just show up after October 7, drones were overhead for years monitoring everything that moved on the ground. People were struggling to leave Gaza for medical needs.

“When we were in Gaza in August, two months before the war, Gaza needed hundreds of thousands of all kinds of surgeries, from orthopaedic to vascular, they didn’t have the expertise and even if they had the expertise, they didn’t have the supplies or the equipment.

“I used to visit Gaza, I would say, not frequently, but every now and then, maybe once a year, to visit my family. My entire family is actually in Gaza, my mother is a victim of this war, she died in April after evacuating her out of Gaza.

“My entire family is displaced in Khan Yunis and Al-Mawasi, I think I have more than 220 of them living in tents, turned homeless, many of them with higher educations, doctors, engineers, medical students, university professors, all stuck in tents.

As a Palestinian, I can tell you, the people of Gaza are still OK despite all this carnage

“I think what Israel has failed to do is is destroy the Palestinian spirit. It’s unbeatable.

“Whether it’s now or before the war, you find people are going to bury someone you know, it’s a funeral, and you find just across the street, people are celebrating and having a wedding at the same time.

“Israel destroys a hospital today, come back in a month, it’s already rebuilt and fixed with whatever they have.”

Dr Khaled Saleh 

More than 30 years of experience, could not prepare orthopaedic surgeon Dr Khaled Saleh for the conditions he experienced in Gaza recently.

“As a physician of 30 plus years, I was overwhelmed. You walk into a situation where you have no supplies, people are dying, and at the same time, there’s this need as a physician to make things right, to help, to change the current situation.

“Most of them were children and women — burns, fractures, head traumas, eye injuries, bullets literally in the brain. It’s not that I hadn’t seen these injuries, but seeing the volume and the frequency of these injuries was overwhelming.

“On my first day, I saw a two-week-old child who had become an orphan, and that really set the tone as how this war is going to affect the rest of the world. That child was subjected intrauterine to malnutrition, to lack of food, and now lack of family. This child had nobody, literally, somebody picked her up after a bomb and brought her up.

“She had visceral congenital problems, she wasn’t injured by the grace of God, she was saved.

“We are apolitical, we are physicians we have taken an oath. We work and we strive to save that one life. And you find those wins, like that child we’re able to save. That life made my day.

“But we were literally stunned by the severity, the lack of supplies and the decimation of the infrastructure. Without the equipment, without the medication simple things like minor infections can quickly evolve into amputations because there’s no antibiotics.

With 100% certainty, the death rate has increased exponentially because of a lack of equipment, medications

"Even chronic diseases without trauma, elderly people dependent on medications for cardiac problems, hypertension, vascular disease, the system is non-existent, you have no care. You have no infrastructure to support these people, chronic as well as acute. It is overwhelming.

“Three decades of medicine, I’ve operated on six continents, and it is sad to see that the world has allowed this to continue and to go on. We need this to end, and we need to heal as a world, a global family, to be able to move on and address this massive, massive wrong that’s gone on for months, unstopped and unchecked.”