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Editor's note

Leaving the safety of their family home in California last month for a three-week stint at a hospital just outside Rafah in the Gaza Strip was an act of incredible bravery by Dr Ahlia Kattan and her husband Dr Sameer Khan.

They were part of a group of international doctors voluntarily helping treat victims of Israel’s continuing offensive in Gaza, as well as training local medical staff. But nothing could prepare them for the suffering and violence they saw, which they described in an interview with Thaslima Begum upon their return last week.

At a time when on-the-ground reporting from Gaza is becoming increasingly deadly and difficult, the accounts of these doctors act as a respected messenger reminding decision-makers in graphic detail, if they needed it, of the devastation of war.

Doctors like Kattan and Khan arrive in conflicts such as Gaza despite the clear and present danger to their own life.

At least 340 healthcare workers have been killed in Gaza since the conflict started last October, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory. It’s a tragedy repeated around the world, with hundreds more doctors, nurses and ambulance drivers killed in Sudan, Ukraine, Myanmar and other conflicts last year.

Returning home provided a welcome relief from the sounds of airstrikes and gunfire and sleeping on the hospital floor, “but my thoughts immediately went to those I left behind,” Omar El-Taji, a urologist who usually works in Manchester, told Begum.

“We can’t look away. In the face of such immense suffering, we all have a duty to act.”

Tom Levitt, Commissioning editor, Rights and freedom

Spotlight

‘Nothing justifies what we have witnessed here’
The doctors returning home from Gaza

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