—April 2, 2025, European Gaza Hospital, Al Fukhkhari, Gaza
“There are so many ambulances coming to the morgue,” a friend reports after a quick trip out of the hospital.
The evening is cool. The sun is approaching the horizon. The hospital grounds are calm and quiet but there must be about 300 people. Groups of men, standing or sitting on the curb together, five or 10 people in each, totally silent. Some near the ER. Others closer to the morgue.
Silent.
I mean, aside from the buzz of drones, the roar of planes, the explosion of airstrikes.
I’ve been in Gaza for a little more than a month, working as an orthopedic surgeon with IDEALS, a British charity. I was here for a month back in October last year, doing the same work.
We’ve been sleeping at the hospital, instead of the dormitory in the nursing college next door, to limit the amount of time we spend outdoors going back and forth. One of the college guards used to urge us to come back there whenever he saw us, but today, for the first time ever, he says it’s better that we stay at the hospital. “More safe,” he decides. “Nowhere safe, but hospital more safe. And, I think, more quiet.”
Last night, the Israeli army started bombing nearer to the hospital than during my two previous times here. The hospital’s construction means that it’s relatively insulated from noise, and so I had never heard a quadcopter or machine gun fire from the hospital. Before, even noises like loud drones and explosions that would disturb us constantly in the guesthouse weren’t audible in the hospital.
But now, despite living in the hospital, we can hear drones when we’re in the corridors. And last night, it changed from hearing the odd airstrike to feeling them, over and over again as the building shook with the force.
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The guard shared what it was like in the nursing college building. He says he isn’t usually scared of bombing. But last night, he was scared. Around 4 a.m., he went up to check on the only international volunteers now in that building. Both of them were awake, terrified, wringing their hands. The force of the blasts was making all the doors and hinged windows in the building slam open.
We’d gone to the operating room (OR) yesterday evening, around when the Israeli military decided to start extensively bombing the area around the hospital. It seemed like thunder, at first, although I knew it wasn’t. We sat in a tense room full of on-duty staff hunched over their phones. One nurse was calling his brother repeatedly after an airstrike in their family’s neighbourhood. Finally, he reached his brother, alive and physically unharmed. But their neighbours, as he described, were “torn to pieces.”
Mid-case, one of the nurses tells me that this morning, the Israeli army bombed a UN clinic in Jabaliya, in North Gaza. Nineteen people were killed, according to the earliest reports, nine of them children. “Are they only attacking health-care institutions, now?” one of the international staff asked.
In the evening, everyone in the OR is busy. A 16-year-old boy with a penetrating chest injury and a leg crushed at multiple levels, with vascular injuries at each spot. Amputation through the thigh. Devastating. A 20-year-old woman with multiple brain bleeds, a penetrating chest injury, intestinal injury and possible bladder injury. A man, 31, with an open distal humerus fracture and shrapnel in his bowel and kidneys.
All of them injured by explosions, likely from airstrikes. Other possibilities include tank shelling or a grenade thrown from a quadcopter.
People are screaming in the hallway. Anguished. They’ve received news of the death of a loved one. “Allahuakbar,” they say. Because God is great, even when he taketh away.
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I can hear two drones and the punishing thumps of explosions. I think most of them are from tanks, but there are several airstrikes, one of which makes the whole hospital tremble. How do buildings stay up through this? Even if they’re not hit, how do they survive months of shaking? We hear the whistle of a missile spinning through the air. They say that you don’t hear the bomb that kills you, only the ones that don’t. I stir hot chocolate powder into my cup and take two coconut-flavoured cookies, and I wonder why the hell I’m so calm.
If my experience moves you, please write a short letter to Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly, Prime Minister Mark Carney and National Defence Minister Bill Blair to tell Canada to honour the agreement they made last year not to approve any new weapons sales to Israel. A recent report stated that after that promise, a Crown corporation signed a new deal to sell artillery propellants to the United States, which will then supply this explosive to Israel to use to fire 155-millimetre artillery shells. Please tell them that ambulance drivers and UN workers were hit by Israeli attacks. Tell them about my patients, my colleagues or me.
Something makes the whole hospital shudder, again. The curtains blow inward, and the door on the opposite side of the room slams. Apparently, it was a house in Khan Younis and all the tents around it. Airstrikes. On tents.
It won’t be long before more patients start pouring into the ER, and more of them come up for treatment in the OR.
What I’m living through right now is the worst thing I’ve ever experienced. Yet I have an enduring sense that this is where I need to be.
***
Deirdre Nunan is an orthopedic surgeon from Lanigan, Sask., who has worked in Gaza.
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