Read American Dr.’s Harrowing Testimony from Gaza

This year’s DNC featured the first-ever panel on Palestinian human rights at any DNC. Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, an American pediatric intensive care surgeon who has been to Gaza several times over the past 10 months with the aid group Doctors Without Borders and other groups. She spoke about some of what she witnessed in Gaza. “We have treated so many children who have lost their entire family that it has — a term has been coined to describe these children — you’ve probably heard it — “wounded child, no surviving family,” WCNSF. This is a term that has been coined since October to describe this very frequent phenomenon that I personally witnessed more times than I can count while I was there. For children — I have held the hand of children who are taking their last gasps, because their entire family was killed in the same attack and couldn’t be there holding their hand and comforting them, and could not bury them thereafter. For the children who I treated who were discharged, they were — and survived, they face a Russian roulette of a hundred ways that they will likely and potentially die when they leave the hospital due to the circumstances incompatible with life that have been architectured by this military assault: direct bombing, starvation, dehydration, disease, alarming reports of the first cases of polio in Gaza right now”…”And now we’re seeing cases emerging in a area of the world that cannot — that has a healthcare system that has been completely and entirely annihilated.” “I received a young boy into the emergency department during one of the mass casualties who had half of his face and neck blown off. Luckily, the organs that are vital for breathing and blood supply to the brain were preserved. They were visible, but preserved. And he was talking to us. He couldn’t see himself, so he didn’t know what he looked like at that point in time, and he kept asking for his sister. His sister was in the bed next to him. The majority of her body was burned beyond recognition. He didn’t recognize that the girl in the bed next to him was his sister. His entire family, parents and the rest of his siblings, were killed in the same attack. That boy survived. And the next day, I went to see him. A very young plastic surgeon, one of the few remaining plastic surgeons in Gaza, because the others have either been killed or have fled, understandably, had removed part of his chest and created a graft to cover those vital organs of the neck. He was lying in his bed and mumbling, because it was so difficult to talk. And he kept saying — I got really close to him, and he said, “I wish I had died, too.” And I said, “What?” And he said, “I think my entire family has gone to heaven” — or, it’s not “my entire family.” His exact words were something to the effect of, “Everybody I love is now in heaven. I don’t want to be here anymore.” That is one of so many stories. I’m giving you the story of one child.” (https://www.democracynow.org/shows/2024/8/20?jwsource=cl)