between Israel and Hamas was lifted, Israeli airstrikes hit the Ed-Durc neighborhood in southern Gaza. Palestinian freelance videographer and photojournalist Montaser al-Sawaf survived the bombing but was severely wounded,Turkey-based Anadolu Agency, for whom al-Sawaf had been working at the time. His brother and other family members, however, did not survive.
“The medical disaster is very large and indescribable,” Palestinian videographer and photojournalist Montaser al-Sawaf said in Arabic. He’d been documenting the humanitarian crisis from his home in Gaza City since the siege began.
Intensified attacks on and in the vicinity of these hospitals have also forced doctors to make impossible choices: In November, one nurse at al-Nasr Hospital in northern Gaza made the painful decision to leave behind several babies in the ICU when the complex was forced to evacuate, as there was no way to safely move them. He carried one of them, theto survive without a respirator, and delivered the infant to an ambulance headed to al-Shifa.
“In the case of newborn babies, they’re at risk because entirely dependent on if a truck with ready-to-use formula is going to cross,” Ahmad said. The pronounced suffering of the Palestinian civilian population has been made more acute by the collapse of health care in Gaza, but an invisibilized dimension of that suffering, which has yet to be broached, is the psychological toll of surviving while surrounded by mass death.“It’s tough to gauge, but nearly every person in Gaza has a story of a loved one killed, a home destroyed, a family separated,” said Ahmad.