“Why did we have to let Nour die? Why this war? Why these children? These are some of the questions that have haunted Sophie* since she returned from her last mission to Gaza last June. For the fourth time since October 7, this doctor established in Switzerland left with an NGO to support her Palestinian colleagues facing the horrors caused by the Israeli army.
The images that crowd into Sophie’s head are terrible. She agreed to share some of them with The Mail. By remaining anonymous for security reasons. Indeed, several of his European colleagues returning from humanitarian missions in Gaza have received death threats and intimidation because of their commitment.
“Let me go”
“Everyone is in one big room, there are no separate boxes. You step over the wounded and the pools of blood and you do what is most urgent.” Sophie describes the emergency department of the last Gazoui hospital where she operated. Amidst the groans of the dying without anesthesia, the prayers of patients who sometimes have to be amputated alive, children begging caregivers to save their brother or their mother. Among the screams and tears also of those who lost their loved ones. The morgue is right next door.
“In Gaza, we always have to make choices.” When she takes care of Ibrahim, 11 years old, Moussa, 6 years old, and Nour, 14 years old, Sophie has just arrived in the enclave. She just had time to drop off her suitcase – which Israeli soldiers had confiscated medicines and medical equipment at checkpoints – in her hospital room. Covered in dirt and blood, Ibrahim is unconscious. The child was disembowelled by a bomb explosion, his intestines are outside his small body. His brother Moussa is awake, his stomach also partly open. At their side, their cousin Nour is conscious, calm. However, one of his legs was torn off. A piece of his femur is surrounded by some debris of skin, shredded muscle and blood.
That day, there were three injured children but only two operating rooms. Nour, who heard the doctors’ discussion, then said to them: “Let me go and save my cousins. I no longer have a family. What am I going to do, alone in Gaza with one leg missing? Sophie and her colleagues managed to save Ibrahim and Moussa. Nour died a few hours later, following hemorrhagic shock and “crush syndrome”.
Eaten by a hound
Sophie also remembers Ahmad, 11 years old. Clinging to his backpack, frozen and silent despite the blood dripping at his feet, the child refuses to get out of the ambulance. Through the insistence of the caregivers, he finally broke his silence. If he doesn’t want to let go of his bag, it’s because it contains the dismembered remains of his twelve-year-old brother Mohamad, which he picked up himself. Ahmad and Mohamad were playing on their bikes when the Israeli bombs fell.
Sophie also looked after Omar, 6 years old. The child was at home with his mother and sister when an Israeli soldier forced the door. Her mother recounted the scene to the doctor: she ran to take refuge in the room with her son and her 9-year-old daughter. There she finds herself facing a dog, an American Bully. The hound tears Omar from his mother’s arms, whom the soldier then knocks out with a rifle butt, and flees dragging the child. A little later, another soldier takes Omar home. Unconscious, bloodied, the little one was placed in a box in jail. He is alive. But his buttocks, torn off by the hound, are a mixture of flesh and crushed bones. Sophie and her colleagues operated on Omar for three and a half hours, by the light of cell phones. The child was saved. But he suffers from severe post-traumatic stress disorder and can no longer control his urination.
“Continue to support them”
According to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child, more than 16,756 children were killed and at least 6,168 injured in Gaza between October 7, 2023 and September 10, 2024. Thousands more are “presumed dead under the rubble,” adds the committee. “Nour, Mohamed, Ahmad and all the Palestinian children injured or killed in Gaza had a life, a family, dreams. They could have been our children, our friends, our neighbors. And I do not believe that they represented a threat to the State of Israel which massacred them,” Sophie slips. The doctor also evokes the heroism of Palestinian colleagues, these seasoned professionals who work in absolute precariousness and an atmosphere of apocalypse, almost without stopping – including when it is their parents whose bodies have been destroyed. were taken to the morgue.
Will she return to Gaza? “I don’t hope so. With each mission, I tell myself that I will never go back. But if duty calls me, I will respond.” In the meantime, Sophie urges everyone to “tell the story of this country and its valiant people”, as she has decided to do. “Talk about them, their stories, their dreams destroyed, their lands violated. Continue to support them by boycotting Israeli products and mobilizing.” And to recall the glimmer of hope in the eyes of her colleagues each time she showed them images of solidarity demonstrations in Europe. “In these moments, they no longer feel alone. They are so happy not to be abandoned.”
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