‘Horror’ in Gaza is ‘incomprehensible,’ says US doctor who treated patients there

Dr. Aqsa Durrani, an American physician who has been providing humanitarian work around the world for over 15 years, said amid the harrowing scenes of death and destruction in Gaza, one story especially sticks with her.

Found injured and alone after an Israeli airstrike, a 4-year-old girl was taken to a trauma field hospital in central Gaza, she told ABC News.

“She was completely in shock. She was not talking and [a colleague] decided, ‘I have to take this little girl home and I have try to see if I can help her find her family,'” said Durrani, a pediatric ICU doctor and an epidemiologist who worked with Doctors Without Borders in Gaza earlier this year.

Durrani, who said her colleagues are working in conditions that are “incomprehensible,” recently gained major attention for an interview on the digital platform “Humans of New York.”

“He has kids around her age. He tried to feed her, he tried have his kids play with her,” Durrani told ABC News. “She was completely non-emotive — for days. And for those days, he tried to find her family.”

He looked in the area where the airstrike hit — a location where displaced people were sheltering — but he wasn’t able to find her family there, according to Durrani.

“Finally, he said that he found a man who said that he had a niece that age and that they were staying in that area, so he brought him to her,” Durrani said.

“He said that when she saw him, she yelled out ‘ammo,’ which means uncle in Arabic, and she ran to him and hugged him. And it was the first time [my colleague] had heard her speak,” Durrani said.

But this was only one child and it took days to find her family because they had been displaced multiple times, Durrani told ABC News.

“I said, ‘It’s so beautiful that you took her and you were able to reunite her with her uncle.’ And he said, ‘I have to do that. I have do that because I have to believe that someone will do that for me when this happens to me, or someone will do that for my children,'” Durrani said.

“I think the story exemplifies every aspect of the horror that everyone is experiencing,” Durrani said.

Durrani was based in central Gaza — working at a trauma field hospital there — from Feb. 24 to April 24, witnessing the end of Israel’s ceasefire agreement with Hamas and the weekslong blockade on all humanitarian aid.

Field hospitals — which are tents and semi-permanent structures — were meant to offload existing hospitals. At the field hospital where Durrani worked, they were only able to provide care to injured or burn patients, she said.

“We could not possibly provide other services with the circumstances that we were in,” Durrani said. “We really had to keep it to lifesaving trauma service.”

“Now, most of the patients that they’re receiving are injured at these supposed aid-distribution sites. They are receiving now more patients with gunshot wounds, including children with gunshot wounds. Each day continues to get worse and we have just been witnessing this genocidal violence now for months and months and it’s beyond anything that even our most experienced humanitarian colleagues can imagine,” Durrani said.

The Israel Defense Forces have previously said shooting incidents at aid sites were under review, but has also said in few instances that it fired “warning shots” toward people who were allegedly “advancing while posing a threat to the troops.”

At least 2,018 have died trying to get humanitarian aid in Gaza and another 15,000 have been injured since May 28, according to Gaza’s Hamas-run Ministry of Health.

Durrani said her colleagues, despite experiencing constant horror were “committed to doing everything in the best way possible and despite their own personal trauma” and continue to come in every day.

“We’ve had physicians who receive their own family members in the ER during during mass casualty incidents. They’re enduring these horrors and also working to provide care in those circumstances,” she said.

“What I cannot stress enough is that they — even in those circumstances, and even despite relentless trauma — were providing beautiful, compassionate, evidence-based care,” Durrani said.

Durrani recalled one day when they “called a child psychiatrist, who was one of the only child psychiatrists in the whole Gaza Strip, he was so apologetic that he could not come to see the children that day and told us that it was because he was actually himself displaced that day, and that he had lost some of his family members.”

The majority of their patients were women and children “even though our hospital was for everyone,” she said.

“We would round on all of the injured patients with the surgeons and go patient by patient. And often there were airstrikes nearby, and the Palestinian doctors and nurses would just speak louder over the bombs. And just continue providing compassionate care to the patients as we continued down the line,” Durrani said.

Food was becoming more scarce toward the end of Durrani’s time in Gaza, she said.

“Much of our days were actually spent trying to work with other organizations to see if we could find any food to give anyone. At the end, I was only able to provide patients with one meal per day, and mothers and children were sharing one portion of one meal,” she said.

“I even had one mother say, ‘Is there anything you can give my child to distract him from the hunger?’ And this was a child who had been burned by a fire that resulted from an airstrike,” she said.

Durrani said she believes the conditions in Gaza are a “deliberate choice” made by Israeli leadership, and called on the U.S. government to withdraw its support for what she called “complete indiscriminate” violence.

The Israeli government has denied that it is limiting the amount of aid entering Gaza and has claimed Hamas steals aid meant for civilians. Hamas has denied those claims.

Israel’s cabinet has approved plans to expand its military campaign in Gaza, drawing widespread criticism from the United Nations and key allies including Germany. U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk said on Aug. 8 the escalation “will result in more killing, more unbearable suffering, [and] senseless destruction.”

More than 100 aid groups have warned of “mass starvation” in Gaza, describing a dire food shortage due to the Israeli government’s siege.

Israeli government spokesman David Mencer pushed back, saying “there is no famine” in Gaza. He blamed Hamas and called the food crisis in Gaza “a man-made shortage engineered by Hamas.”

A USAID analysis appeared to undercut Israeli assertions about the extent to which Hamas has allegedly stolen humanitarian aid. A presentation reviewed by ABC News, examining more than 150 reported incidents involving the theft or loss of U.S.-funded humanitarian aid in Gaza, showed that the group failed to find any evidence that Hamas engaged in widespread diversion of aid to cause the amount of hunger seen in the strip.

Durrani said providing medical aid in the Gaza Strip was an experience unlike any other.

“It’s dystopian, but it elicits a very visceral response. It’s just completely unfathomable that it’s actually, real, everything around you. I entered through the Karam Shalom crossing and we drove through Rafah and Rafah was at that point, even in late February, almost completely destroyed. It just looked like a dystopian reality,” Durrani said.