People in Gaza are risking their lives to retrieve food from a group run by private American contractors as Israeli troops open fire nearby.
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation — a group funded by the United States and Israeli governments — began distributing boxes of food at four sites in Gaza in late May. The United Nations reports that more than 400 Palestinians seeking aid have been shot and killed in and around these GHF food distribution sites.
Dr. Adil Husain, an American emergency medicine physician based in Dallas, spent the past two weeks volunteering at the Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza near one of the GHF aid sites. He described the scenes he witnessed as “apocalyptic.”
“They’re weaponizing starvation to only lure them in and kill them,” Husain said. “They either sit in their tents and starve to death … or they die trying to get food.”
5 questions with Dr. Adil Husain
You have described each day as a mass casualty event. What do you mean?
“What we saw was quite apocalyptic, to say the least. Some were calling it, sadly, ‘hell on Earth.’ I was there for two weeks, and nearly every single day we sadly saw a mass casualty incident, MCI. And the sad reality was that these MCIs occurred primarily every morning, shortly after the opening of the food aid distribution sites.
“Even on my second day there, I woke up to the MCI alarm — this specific alarm that goes off at the hospital, meaning all hands on deck, we need every doctor available to come to the [emergency room]. So I rushed downstairs, and the scenes that I saw were none that you can even fathom. Right when I opened the doors of the ER, there’s just bodies everywhere. People with open wounds, open fractures, bleeding from the belly, evisceration of bowel — meaning their stomachs and the intestines were coming out. And you kind of just attended to the first person that you see.”
What were some of the most frequent injuries you saw?
“What we saw from these food distribution sites were primarily gunshot wounds isolated to the head, the chest and the abdomen. And at least for the food aid distribution sites, a majority of the demographic was young boys and young men. What’s so heartbreaking is so many children are going out for their families to try to be the man of the house and get this food and bring it back. And multiple times, I saw when I was exposing the patient, trying to look for other injuries, they had empty bags under their shirts and in their pants that they hoped to fill with food. Not only were they left with empty bags, but they were left with life-threatening injuries. And a lot of times, what I’m hearing from the families — and even the patients themselves — they said they’ve literally been sitting there waiting patiently, not moving, and they’re being shot [from] above by snipers.
“For example, I just [treated] a young 10-year-old boy, and he had a bag with him that he hoped to fill with food. And he was shot through the face, through the jaw, and it went into his neck — his cervical spine. He’s having difficulty moving his arms. He’s likely going to be paralyzed.
“We talk about the deaths — like, yes, over 400 deaths in the food aid distribution sites in the past month. Granted, yes, all those lives matter. But what we don’t talk about is the hundreds of thousands of lives that have been changed forever. Just imagine — your brother, your nephew, your niece, your uncle, just being mindlessly shot in the head and the spine. And they will never live a normal life ever again. They’ll never walk again. It’s quite appalling. And my heart goes out to them.
“For example, I had a woman who was 16 weeks pregnant, and she was sleeping in her tent, just trying to get some solace. And the family told me that they just heard shooting from a quadcopter above, just shooting into the tents. A bullet went through her abdomen, through the uterus. The bullet actually went partially through the face of the baby, the fetus. And she lost the baby. And they actually had to do a hysterectomy because the uterus was so damaged. So not only did she lose her child, but she’ll never have a child again. So it’s just like that trauma of just one person mindlessly just being shot at in the Green Zone. It haunts me every day.”
What are you hearing from Palestinians about their situation, their desperation, their lives in this moment of the war?
“The resilience and the hope and the optimism of the people of Gaza is out of this world. They live in such a dystopian world where there’s just pain and suffering constantly, yet they remain so positive. Yes, they cry in pain. Yes, they cry in suffering. But never do they lose hope. They’re just they’re the most patient of people. They say, ‘This is what God decreed. We will get our justice at some point.’ And they keep moving on.
“In terms of the food aid distribution, the starvation is real. It’s not only in babies not getting formula — it’s also in the adults. The number of adults I’ve confirmed death on in the ER with my cardiac ultrasound, checking for cardiac activity, I lost count. They’re just skin and bones. I myself lost 13 lb. People in my group lost 15 lb because we were just eating bread and beans once or twice a day, because there’s just not enough food. ‘Starve to death’ … that phrase is real for them.
“I did not hear them curse … the Israelis or anything like that. The one thing I did hear was that they are really upset with the neighboring countries who have not let them in or not sent aid. The Arab countries, the Muslim countries, they are like, ‘Why are they not speaking up for us?’ That’s what’s so heartbreaking. So I just pray that the government officials, the world leaders, hear this and see this and try to make change because it’s a humanitarian issue at the end of the day.”
You are the father of a young child. How are you processing what you saw?
“I have a 6-month-old … love her to death. And that’s why the cases that really hit me were the pediatric cases. Not that other lives don’t matter. But I saw my baby girl in a lot of these kids. So those are the ones that really hit me … What we’re seeing is unnatural. It’s unnatural to see this amount of death, this amount of blood, this amount of bullets in children.
“I saw a couple of malnourished kids that literally died in front of me. I just saw them one day and I found out the next day that they passed away. There was a baby, Hassan, who actually wasn’t even a baby, but he was the size of a baby. He was 3 years old, weighed 6 kg, which is, like, nothing. He should be weighing at least 15 kg. And he had severe malnutrition — why? Because there’s not enough baby formula in Gaza. And the sad reality is that starvation is manmade. The baby formula is just miles away at the border. It’s just not being let in.”
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
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Hafsa Quraishi produced and edited this segment for broadcast with Micaela Rodríguez. Quraishi also produced it for the web.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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