AhlulBayt News Agency: The Spanish newspaper El País published an article by Spanish doctor Raúl Incertis, who volunteered in the emergency and anesthesia departments at two hospitals in Gaza between April and July of this year. In the article, he shares his testimony of what he witnessed of the tragedy befalling children and other civilian victims.
He said that just three weeks after arriving, he lost the ability to count the children who were amputated, disfigured, torn apart, and burned children that the medical team had to treat not to mention those who died among them.
Incertis added, “There is a black cloud in my head, made up of horrific images that will not let me forget. So many people died right in front of our eyes despite our desperate attempts to save them, including those who drew their last breath as we provided care.”
He continued, “I lost the ability to count the transport carts or donkey-pulled wagons full of bodies on their way to the morgue, which the hospitals never stopped receiving. They went in and out as if it were a factory where workers clock in and out except they were dead. Most of their faces were frozen in terror, reflecting their last feeling before being killed.”
The Spanish doctor recounted the bombing of a six-year-old girl, whose image remains seared in his memory, “I held her severed, burned arm to move it aside because it was in our way as we tried to give her a chance to live. She was wearing an undershirt printed with little sheep, which we had to cut off to examine her. But she later died, and I never learned her name.”
He pointed out that the arrival of civilians was a daily occurrence, sometimes several times a day, many of them with bullets in the head and chest.
“They were human beings just like us, standing in line to receive humanitarian aid, and they were targeted by sniper fire, tanks, mortars, and drones. There were 40, 60, or 90 wounded all at once and on one morning alone, the number of people we received exceeded 200.”
He went on to say, “We stumbled over the wounded lying on the ground and even fell on top of them. Many were children and women. Their numbers were beyond what we could handle, and many died waiting for help that never came.”
Children first
The doctor said that amid this hellscape, he was sure of at least one thing, “We must start with the children.”
He recalled another case of a girl no more than a year and a half old, shot in the chest while in her mother’s arms. She had come from one of the so-called “humanitarian safe zones” in Gaza a scene he described as disgusting given what happened.
Incertis also witnessed Dr. Alaa, a pediatrician, lose a large part of her soul when nine of her ten children, along with her husband, were killed in an Israeli airstrike while she was on duty.
He added, “I don’t know where she found the strength to come back three days later, dressed in mourning, to thank the doctors who treated her only surviving child, Adam.”
The doctor said he lost count of the number of parents who had lost their children, and of the women and men he saw lying on the ground in shock or screaming as they received their dead children on hospital beds.
Colleagues who lost family
He stressed that all of his colleagues, without exception, had lost first or second-degree relatives. Among them was Ahmed, the surgical nurse, who was killed with his three children by a bomb that struck his hut. Incertis noted that no one had ever been able to put a smile on his face the way Ahmed did despite his suffering and miserable circumstances always greeting him warmly and offering a kind word that made him feel like a better person.
He explained that the medical team would receive, almost every night, entire families after their huts were bombed in the displacement camps in the so-called “humanitarian zone” in Al-Mawasi the very place they had been ordered to flee to in order to avoid Israeli attacks, and where they are now being told to go again.
Incertis concluded his article by saying, “Others may decide later whether what happened was genocide or not, but I have crossed Gaza length and breadth, and I know one thing for sure: you cannot live there.”
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