At Shifa Hospital in Gaza, the war is not over yet

In early December, “we heard the tanks advancing from the edge of the yellow line,” Ahmed recalls. A 14-year-old girl was quickly transferred to the intensive care unit with shrapnel wounds in the abdomen. The girl needed 250 milliliters of blood, a “precious resource” at Al-Shifa Hospital, in addition to a splenectomy. Even with minimal supplies, and even in the middle of an attack that wasn’t supposed to happen, doctors at Shifa Hospital saved her life.

When Ahmed left, the girl came out “smiling.” Her wounds were so severe that the doctors used some of their custom gauze on her. But the girl had no choice but to return to her family’s tent, a barely stable environment, to recover. Even before she was admitted to Al-Shifa Hospital, she was suffering from “severe malnutrition.” The return of some quantities of food to the shelves did not help her family, who cannot pay the inflationary prices. Ahmed, concerned for the girl, keeps in touch.

On December 11, Ahmed recorded a four-minute audio message to commemorate her thoughts on her last day in Gaza. It indicates the presence of bulldozers in the background. Rescue teams took advantage of the relative calm to exhume the yard, which had become a necessary grave for countless people to recover. “The smell of death is literal in this case,” she says in the voice note. Al Jazeera story three days ago I mentioned The Palestinian Red Crescent recovered 150 bodies.

“This hospital is haunted by all the stories of people who were killed, and then all the stories that are being told now, because we have so little space and time to hear them, about what happened to people,” Ahmed says. “It is not limited to the Shifa Hospital campus, but it is everywhere in Gaza.”

Along with the attacks on Palestinian lives, health, and movement, comes the attack on what remains of their sovereignty. In recent months, the Israeli government has opened the floodgates The state and settlers’ seizure of West Bank lands. President Trump has createdpeace council” To govern Gaza, starting with building A 350-acre military base to station 5,000 soldiers.

The ceasefire announcement, however unilateral, prompted many, especially in the United States, to move forward. “This is a complete disaster,” says Sidhwa, a trauma surgeon in California, “and means the Palestinians will be destroyed in Gaza.” As Israel’s partner, providing it with weapons and diplomatic cover during the genocide, the United States is also the only potential monitor of its behavior. “It’s very frustrating that we don’t have the political culture or the media culture, or even the moral culture, to realize that we should care about our crimes,” Sidhwa says.

But Gaza is more than just a crime scene. “Obviously most of it has been destroyed, but Gaza City is beautiful, and the people are beautiful,” Thorburn says. In Al-Ahly, she lived with 10 young women in their twenties. They were nurses, radiology technicians, medical students, and laboratory technicians. They took Thorburn to the beach to watch people fishing – a dangerous activity with the Israeli Navy offshore – enjoying a picnic with their food, and otherwise “doing their best to live a normal life.” They resisted attempts to tear them apart, and wove themselves together, each reinforcing the other, like gauze.