Dr. Zouhair Lahna has worked in conflict zones around the world – Syria, Libya, Yemen, Uganda and Ethiopia – but has never seen anything like the Israeli war in Gaza.
In these life-threatening situations, said the French Moroccan pelvic surgeon and obstetrician, there was a path to safety for civilians.
But on Tuesday, Israeli forces seized and closed Gaza’s Rafah border crossing with Egypt – the only way out of the war for Palestinians and the most important entry point for humanitarian aid.
“This is another injustice. … It’s not human,” Lahna said, shaking his head as he spoke to Al Jazeera from Cairo, Egypt, where he was evacuated from the Gaza European Hospital in Khan Younis.
He regrets having to leave his Palestinian colleagues behind.
“I’m angry, worried, upset… because I left some people. They are my friends. I was with them, these doctors, these people. …We ate together, we worked together and now I left them in trouble. They have to move their families, look for a tent, look for water, food,” he said.
Lahna spent months volunteering in Gaza hospitals as part of missions organized by the Association of Palestinian Doctors in Europe (PalMed Europe) and US-based Rahma International.
On the morning that displaced Palestinians in eastern Rafah were ordered to evacuate and before Israeli tanks arrived, Lahna and her foreign colleagues received text messages from the Israeli army.
“The Israeli army knows everything. They know everyone in Gaza and how to reach them. They told us to leave.”
The texts urged foreign doctors to leave Gaza because the Israeli military would soon begin an operation in eastern Rafah.
A few hours later, Lahna and her counterparts from PalMed Europe and Rahma International were detained by their organizations and taken to a safe location in Cairo.
“There were four doctors at the European Hospital, four at the Kuwait Hospital and two others,” he said. “We waited while they gave our names to the Egyptian and Israeli authorities, and finally we were ordered to leave.”
As they departed, leaflets from the Israeli military printed with the evacuation order fell from the sky along with missiles from Israeli warplanes.
People were panicking as they headed north from Rafah toward Khan Younis or west toward the sea, Lahna recalled.
Collapse of a system
When asked about the conditions of the hospitals he worked in, Lahna has difficulty describing what he saw.
He starts to speak, then pauses, apologetically, hurt by the number of sick, injured and dying individuals that were brought in daily.
“It’s hard for me to remember that,” he said slowly.
Although the European Hospital was spared an Israeli attack, it has received referrals from other overwhelmed hospitals.
It has also been a place of shelter for displaced people trying to find space wherever they can, including at the doors of patient rooms, in the building’s corridors, on the stairs and in the hospital garden.
Before the European Hospital, Lahna and her team worked as volunteers at the Kamal Adwan Hospital in the city of Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza. He is among the few foreign doctors who have traveled to the region.
They worked there for a week, the longest period Israeli authorities allowed them to stay there, he said.
There, the situation was even more dire, the doctor said, exacerbated by what the World Food Program considers to be a “total famine” in northern Gaza.
In December, the hospital was the scene of an Israeli attack when the military besieged and bombarded it for several days. Displaced families were also sheltering there and were detained along with staff and medical personnel.
Gaza’s hospitals, most of which are no longer functioning, were also the sites of mass graves discovered after Israeli attacks. Graves have been found in recent weeks at Nasser and al-Shifa hospitals, along with 392 bodies.
Working for peace, not war
With the healthcare system in Gaza collapsing, Lahna is determined to return and volunteer there once again, but is not sure when that will be possible.
For now, he said, he will return to France to check in on his “other job” and spend time with his family, who may have had a harder time than him because all they did was worry about him. while he was in Gaza. .
He is certain that all of Rafah will soon be occupied by Israeli forces, which will be deadly for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians there, he said.
“This world is blind,” said Lahna, dismayed that the Rafah incursion is likely to continue to occur despite warnings from the international community, which has been unable to stop Israel from committing mass atrocities, he said.
“Human rights are a joke. The United Nations is a big joke,” Lahna added.
He believes the war is as much a US conflict as it is Israel’s, with the US last month approving an additional $17 billion in aid to its main Middle East ally.
For Lahna, university students protesting around the world, especially in the US, and who oppose Israel’s continued attack, know the value of human rights.
However, when it comes to Palestinians, he said, they are realizing that these values do not apply – and they are increasingly disillusioned with their elected representatives and the state of the world.
That disillusionment is taking a toll on the doctor himself, but he said it has also strengthened his determination to offer his expertise to people in war zones around the world, including Gaza.
Asked if he is worried about being arrested. Tortured or killed for his work in the enclave, the surgeon barely blinks.
He said his time to die will come one day or another and if that happens while helping the vulnerable in Gaza, then that will be the right time for him to go.
“I am no more precious than the Palestinian people,” Lahna said. “I am a humanitarian doctor. I work. I help people. [We] doctors come looking for peace. We didn’t go to war.”
This story originally appeared on Aljazeera.com read the full story
