The New Yorker:

As a doctor at Al-Aqsa Hospital, I saw what a collapse in the ceasefire could mean—and what can happen when a patient is given a chance.

By Ayesha Khan

In late 2024, shortly before a ceasefire curbed the violence in Gaza, I was on a monthlong medical mission to Al-Aqsa Hospital, in central Gaza, lending my emergency-medicine expertise to local doctors. Most of these doctors were displaced themselves, their homes destroyed, but they continued to show up at the emergency department as volunteers. Almost every day, we responded to a mass-casualty incident—an event that overwhelms the resources of the hospital. On many days, we experienced more than one.

On December 8th, an air strike on a tent in the Nuseirat refugee camp killed at least five people, including two parents and two children. Another air strike flattened a residential building in the Bureij refugee camp, killing at least nine. Bureij was two miles away, and we could hear the explosion from inside the hospital. We rushed to the ambulance bay, preparing to receive patients.

The first was a seven-year-old boy. Apart from very treatable entry and exit wounds behind his kneecap, he looked unscathed. At first, I thought he was lucky. Then E.M.T.s arrived cradling his baby sister Sabah, who was about six months old. Their parents had just been killed in the same attack.

I ran after Sabah into the critical-care room. Wrapped in a shiny thermal blanket, she might have looked serene if not for the tubes in her nose and mouth. I could see subtle bruising behind her eyelids. There were gaping wounds on her cheeks and fractures in her skull.

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