Dr. Adam Hamawy served in Gaza in May of this year. He is one of 99 physicians who signed an open letter to Biden and Harris one year into Israel’s genocide in Gaza, titled “End this madness now.” That letter ended, “Every day that we continue supplying weapons and munitions to Israel is another day that women are shredded by our bombs and children are murdered with our bullets.” 

On December 3, Dr. Hamawy presented a powerful, moving slideshow to a full house at Revolution Books in New York City. The event was co-sponsored by Revolution Books and revcom.us and hosted and moderated by revcom.us correspondent Alan Goodman. It was livestreamed, and the entire event including the Q&A is available online to share. And you can watch it here!

The following short excerpts from Dr. Adam Hamawy’s presentation have been lightly edited for clarity. During the presentation, Dr. Hamawy showed detailed photos of children wounded and killed by Israeli bombs, shells, and bullets. Out of respect for the dignity of the victims, the audience was asked not to take photos of this part of the presentation, but Dr. Hamawy’s descriptions (which follow) paint a vivid picture of what he presented, the reality for Palestinians in Gaza barely surviving, and many not surviving at all.

Inside European Gaza Hospital: These Are All Children

I was stationed at the European Gaza Hospital. It’s in Khan Younis, which is in the southern part of Gaza. It’s right on the border with Rafah, so when they started bombing Rafah we were right along the edge. So, all the evacuation zone came right up to where we were, and we were the first area that was “clear,” even though the hospital itself got struck right outside.

So, there was some buildings outside our gate that were struck when we were there. There were also some houses, a doctor and nurse who lived only like a couple blocks away were killed when their house was struck when we were there.

This is what it looked like, before. I got these photos from the internet, what it looked like before we got there. You couldn’t see this when we were there because all there was there were tents and people living there. The hospital had about 15,000 to 20,000 refugees living there within the compound. The compound was the hospital, they had a little warehouse there, and also had a nursing college. This is the emergency room.

This is inside the hospital, just to give you a sense of what it looks like with people living there. Families, both sides, you can see, they didn’t even have tents, they had sheets, plastic. People were cooking, kids were running through the halls. People were sleeping. Stairways were also filled. This was shelter for so many families. And this was “five-star conditions” because most people didn’t have a roof on their head. Most people were outside. Even outside the compound, along the beach, and just living in the open elements.

That was in May. People are now living in open elements in wintertime when it is raining, when it is cold. Two weeks ago those living along the shore, there was like 40 tents that were flooded and washed away. There's a family that lives close to us in New Jersey whose relatives, they lost two daughters with that because the waters came and two daughters disappeared and they found them drowned later.

[Dr. Hamawy makes this announcement before showing a set of images of wounded, dying, and dead children he and his colleagues treated:] If you are taking photos, please don't take photos, starting now. And they are disturbing. But this is what you see every day in Gaza. 

So, people being brought in by friends, by family members, they usually come in clusters, they usually come in groups of people because they're usually sleeping in their homes or in their tents or in an area together where they're gathered and usually a bomb will fall on them. It could be an airstrike, it could be from the Israeli navy which is outside the ships or it could be from artillery which is all stationed outside the walls in Gaza. 

The European Gaza Hospital normally has 200 beds. It had 1,500 patients inside, that's besides the 15,000 to 20,000 people [staying there]. So that's over seven times its normal capacity.

Many times we're treating people on the floor. Not everyone survives these strikes, obviously. Many of them die at the scene. A good third of them die in the emergency room while we're taking care of them. And only a third really make it upstairs for either surgery or to the ICU. And those who make it to the ICU only 20% survive.

So, you see different sized sheets, children, adults, basically families. These aren't soldiers, these aren't troops, these aren't fighters, these are not Hamas.

”This child, I think, was about 10 years old.”

They called me to take a look at his face. Everyone in his family was killed, both parents and his siblings. You could see the fragment injuries all over his body that was peppered. I looked at him, and you could see the obvious face wounds, but he said that he also received an eye injury. He had one eye that was melted away. The other eye had small fragments in there, so he lost both his vision. He was completely awake and alert when I spoke to him, but could not see anything and had no one else that survived that he knew. Because I saw that melted eye, we got a CT scan.

He has a fragment that is in there. We had a neurosurgeon with us. I asked him about this, and he said it's in such a sensitive area, and because he's still awake and talking, that we have to just leave it because going after it might hurt him more. So, we put him under watch. We gave him whatever antibiotics we could because we don't want this to get infected, but this is what we're seeing again every day.

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Watch the entire event online, including a dynamic and thoughtful Q&A. Learn more about Dr. Hamawy and how to contact him and support his work at https://www.globalsurgeryfoundation.org/.