JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
After more than two years of war in Gaza, the destruction is overwhelming. Its once-functional health care system has taken a massive hit. Palestinians say that reconstructing medical facilities, like the territory's flagship Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, is going to be a major challenge. With so many doctors being casualties of war, today, hospitals like Al-Shifa also depend on outside volunteers.
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NAHREEN AHMED: I'm walking to the emergency room from the building in which we sleep. You see the very overwhelming appearance of the surgical hospital that is haunted by the ghosts of so many that were killed there.
SUMMERS: That is the voice note of one doctor, a volunteer from the U.S. who spent most of December in the devastated hospital. She sent NPR's Hadeel Al-Shalchi near daily voice messages.
HADEEL AL-SHALCHI, BYLINE: Dr. Nahreen Ahmed is a 41-year-old lung doctor from Philadelphia. She spent 17 days in Al-Shifa Hospital, and we talked almost daily. There was a passion in her voice for the work she was doing and a concern for the people she treated and worked with. She described many dramatic and chilling moments.
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AHMED: I'm standing in the ICU and I hear a scream from the other side of the room. I look out the window. I am looking across the street at nearly fully destroyed buildings, with the faces of them completely blown off.
So we're here sitting down on the floor with our teammates eating lunch. It's rice and some salad. And it's, you know, it's a similar meal on a daily basis. It's usually about one meal a day.
AL-SHALCHI: Every day, she sent rare glimpses into what it was like in Al-Shifa.
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AHMED: Thanks. I'm currently walking into the ICU and, you know, we never really know what's going face us as we walk in.
AL-SHALCHI: The daughter of Bangladeshi parents, this work is very personal to Dr. Ahmed. Her grandfather was a surgeon during the Bangladesh Liberation War from Pakistan in the 1970s. She grew up knowing that he stayed behind as the Pakistani forces closed in and was eventually put to death.
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AHMED: He and the remaining doctors and nurses and ambulance driver that stayed back to treat patients at the hospital were lined up behind the hospital and shot by firing squad.
AL-SHALCHI: Inspired by the story, she's now worked in conflict zones around the world - Ukraine, Yemen, Sudan. But Gaza, she says, is overwhelming.
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AHMED: It's December 4th morning and getting ready to go to the ICU, and I'm feeling a bit anxious because there are definitely more missile strikes happening.
AL-SHALCHI: Technically, the war is over. There was a ceasefire brokered back in October, but the Israeli military is still in charge - aid groups say greatly restrict supplies to the hospital and routinely attacks parts of Gaza, saying it's rooting out Hamas militants. Dr. Ahmed was worried for her patients, doctors and also the future of Gaza's health care system.
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AHMED: You know, so many of the highly specialized surgeons either were killed or they're imprisoned or they fled. And so, today, I feel really frustrated by this, just all of the barriers that are being put up, building up the educational system, bringing in specialized surgeons and doctors to Gaza.
AL-SHALCHI: Palestinians in Gaza have to do what they can to survive, even when cooking food.
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AHMED: It's being used somewhere else?
AL-SHALCHI: One incident really brought it home for Dr. Ahmed.
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AHMED: OK. So this is asthma.
AL-SHALCHI: A woman came in with asthma symptoms. She'd been cooking over a stove, breathing in toxic fumes because she was burning plastic. Wood or fuel is rare to find in Gaza. But there's only one nebulizer in the emergency room, and Dr. Ahmed says it could have turned into a scary situation.
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AHMED: If multiple people come in needing it, we need to basically figure out who's the priority. The closest we ever got to that in the U.S. was COVID, having to make decisions about who gets the last ventilator or who gets the last resource that could potentially save a life.
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AL-SHALCHI: Dr. Ahmed took me with her on rounds, trying to make me feel like I was really there.
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AHMED: I'm walking to the administration building, and as I walk, I look around, and there are just piles of debris and rubble everywhere, destroyed cars.
AL-SHALCHI: Palestinians often sift through that debris and rubble to find things to use for shelter, and it worried her.
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AHMED: In my experience as a doctor who trained as a pulmonologist in New York, and having seen patients 15 years post 9/11, frontline workers were having respiratory issues from cleaning debris, you know, a decade, decade and a half after 9/11 happened.
AL-SHALCHI: Dr. Ahmed says she's in awe of how Palestinian doctors just keep going. One doctor she bonded with studied in Bangladesh, in the same city her family's from. She made sure to take a photo with him before leaving.
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AHMED: When I showed him the picture, he said, it's a beautiful picture, but the background is a graveyard.
AL-SHALCHI: And just a reminder that death is literally all around, she says. The words of one Palestinian doctor sticks with her.
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AHMED: Palestinians were able to withstand all the things that come our way because we've been experiencing this our entire lives, in our entire history. But this war - this is different.
AL-SHALCHI: The level of destruction is just unprecedented. Back home now, Dr. Ahmed is trying to rest and process her time at Al-Shifa Hospital, thankful for the connections she's made, but also wondering, has the world turned its back on Gaza?
Hadeel Al-Shalchi, NPR News, Tel Aviv. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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