Dr. Zouhair Lahna has worked in conflict zones around the world – Syria, Libya, Yemen, Uganda and Ethiopia – but he has never seen anything like Israel’s war on Gaza.
In these life-threatening situations, said the French Moroccan pelvic surgeon and obstetrician, there is a path to safety for civilians.
But on Tuesday, Israeli forces seized and closed the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt – the Palestinians’ only exit from the war 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 Tel Aviv Tribune from Cairo, Egypt, where he was evacuated from the European Gaza Hospital in Khan Younis.
He regrets having to leave his Palestinian colleagues behind.
“I’m angry, confused, upset… because I left certain people. These are my friends. I was with them, these doctors, these people. …We eat together, we work together and now I’ve 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 the American company Rahma International.
On the morning that displaced Palestinians from 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 army would soon begin an operation in eastern Rafah.
Hours later, Lahna and her counterparts from PalMed Europe and Rahma International were picked up by their organizations and brought to safety in Cairo.
“There were four doctors in the European hospital, four in the Kuwaiti hospital and two others,” he said. “We waited for them to give our names to the Egyptian and Israeli authorities, and finally we were ordered to leave. »
As they left, Israeli army leaflets printed with the evacuation order fell from the sky along with missiles from Israeli warplanes.
People were panicked as they headed north from Rafah toward Khan Younis or west toward the sea, Lahna recalled.
Collapse of a system
Asked about the conditions of the hospitals he worked in, Lahna struggled to describe what he saw.
He starts to speak, then stops, apologizing, pained by the number of sick, wounded and dying who were brought in daily.
“It’s hard for me to remember,” he said slowly.
Although the European hospital was spared an Israeli raid, it received referrals from other overwhelmed hospitals.
It is also a place of shelter for displaced people who are trying to find space wherever they can, including at the doors of patient rooms, in the corridors of the building, on the stairs and in the garden of the ‘hospital.
Before the European Hospital, Lahna and her team volunteered at Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahiya, northern Gaza. He is one of the rare foreign doctors to have visited the region.
They worked there for a week, the longest 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 calls “widespread famine” in northern Gaza.
In December, the hospital was the scene of an Israeli raid when the army besieged and bombed it for several days. Displaced families had also taken refuge there and were grouped alongside medical staff.
Gaza’s hospitals, most of which no longer function, have also been the site of mass graves discovered after Israeli raids. Graves have been discovered in recent weeks in Nasser and al-Shifa hospitals, along with 392 bodies.
Work for peace, not war
With the healthcare system in Gaza collapsing, Lahna is determined to return and volunteer, but she doesn’t know when that will be possible.
For now, he said, he will return to France to check in at his “other job” and spend time with his family, who may have had it harder than him because they didn’t ‘only worried about him while he was in Gaza. .
He is sure that all of Rafah will soon be occupied by Israeli forces, which will be deadly for the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians there, he said.
“This world is blind,” Lahna said, dismayed that the Rafah incursion is likely to continue despite warnings from the international community, which has been unable to stop Israel from committing mass atrocities.
“Human rights are a joke. The United Nations is a big joke,” Lahna added.
He believes the war is as much an American conflict as an Israeli one, with the United States last month approving an additional $17 billion in aid to its main Middle Eastern ally.
For Lahna, university students protesting around the world, including in the United States, and opposing ongoing Israeli aggression know the value of human rights.
Yet when it comes to Palestinians, he says, they realize those values don’t apply — and are increasingly disillusioned with their elected officials and the state of the world.
This disillusionment weighs on the doctor himself, but he said it has also strengthened his resolve to offer his expertise to people living in war zones around the world, including Gaza.
He was asked if he feared arrest. tortured or killed for his work in the enclave, the surgeon barely deaf.
He said his time to die would come one day or another and if it happened while he was helping vulnerable people in Gaza, then it would be his time to go.
“I am not more valuable than the Palestinian people,” Lahna said. “I am a humanitarian doctor. I’m working. I help people. (We) doctors come for peace. We are not coming for war.
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