30 years old. Married with 2 children. MSF staff member - medical profile.
May 2021 was the first time I witnessed an aggression while having a family of my own: a wife and two kids. The bombs had never been this close to us. My kids were scared and screaming. Nothing we said could calm them down. I tried lying to them, saying it was fireworks, but my daughter could tell I wasn’t speaking the truth; she said fireworks were never that loud and they had pretty lights; these ones were too loud and all she could see was fire around our building.
I think my biggest fear was of losing my family. Both me and my wife are health workers and we needed to take turns to go to the hospital and stay with the kids. While at the hospital, I was constantly worried that my phone was going to ring, and someone would tell me that my family was dead.
MSF ambulances couldn’t move. We had to get a ride with colleagues with no assurance that we would arrive safely to the hospital. They were targeting everything. Not even the hospital was safe. While we were in the operating theatre, bombs fell around us. One was targeting a building north of the hospital, not more than 300 meters away. Another one was 100 meters down south of the hospital. The operating theatre was constantly shaking, as if there was an earthquake. We were scared that we might be the next target.
The intensity of the bomb was also something I’ve never seen in previous aggressions. It was a rain of missiles, a pouring rain. Bombs every second, everywhere. Gaza seemed to be completely on fire. On the way to the hospital, we could see the buildings in the middle of the city completely destroyed and the bodies on the streets. A lot of these buildings had many families.
At the hospitals, crowds and crowds arrived with many different wounds. Once again, we were overwhelmed by the mass casualties Israel inflicted on Gaza. There was not enough blood for transfusions, we didn’t have enough ICU capacity. We just could not treat that number of people at the same time. We were just aiming to save as many lives as we could on the spot. Sepsis was everywhere, potential COVID transmissions and other communicable diseases.
It was shorter than previous aggressions, but way more intense. Nothing we learned from previous escalations helped us this time. We were all just waiting for our turn to die. Before, we had breaks from the bombings, humanitarian corridors. This time, there was nothing, nowhere to run to, nowhere to be safe.
My daughter used to love to go to the beach. Before May 2021, she asked to go every day. In May 2021, however, we could see the shore being bombed from our window. It took her months to ask me again to take her to the beach. She is only 3 years old, and she can already tell the different sounds of explosions, fireworks and missiles. That’s their childhood; it’s not a healthy childhood. God knows what kind of trauma they will carry throughout their lives.