On a hazy morning in November, a group of aid workers with M\u00e9decins Sans Fronti\u00e8res (M.S.F.), known in English as Doctors Without Borders, crossed into Gaza for a two-month mission. Jennifer Hulse, an emergency physician from the U.K., led a medical team. \u201cWe all had as many bags as we could physically carry,\u201d Hulse said. Inside were essential supplies such as surgical tools and engine oil for generators. Her assignment was to help the Gaza Health Ministry restore access to health care in the north, where Israeli attacks had flattened nearly every building in sight.<\/p>\n
The team first spent several days at Gaza\u2019s sole remaining hospital focussed on pediatrics\u2014Al-Rantisi, in Gaza City, which was barely operational after Israeli air strikes. The roof had collapsed in places. Doctors were seeing patients in a waiting room with only a few cots. \u201cIt was very cold, even inside the buildings,\u201d Hulse told me. When a storm blew through, she mistook thunderclaps for explosions. She learned that parents sometimes arrived with the bodies of infants who seemed to have died of hypothermia. Her team quickly put together a plan to help co\u00f6rdinate repairs, secure new electrical generators, implement a triage system, and organize trainings for staff. \u201cWe were just trying to get it functional again,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Next, Hulse travelled to Jabalia, in the northern reaches of the Gaza Strip, where the situation was even worse. She was driven through rutted streets in which not a single building remained intact. The area had previously been served by several health-care facilities, including a primary-care center\u2014now destroyed\u2014and the Indonesian Hospital, which I visited<\/a> during a temporary ceasefire, in early 2025. But this past October, as part of another ceasefire agreement<\/a> brokered by the Trump Administration, Israeli forces effectively divided Gaza in two, pushing the population toward the sea. Nearly all of the surviving health-care facilities in the northernmost area fell on the wrong side of the partition. \u201cNo one can reach them now,\u201d Hulse said. To get proper medical care, she went on, an injured person would have to make it to a crossroads and flag down a donkey cart to Gaza City, which could take hours. As a stopgap, the M.S.F. team and Gaza\u2019s health ministry had decided to open a temporary clinic in the area.<\/p>\n Hulse and her colleagues spent several days searching for a suitable location. At one point, she saw a group of children playing on what had once been the roof of a building. They climbed into a cardboard box and slid down the sloped surface as though they were sledding. \u201cThere was nothing, absolutely nothing,\u201d she told me. \u201cEven finding a flat piece of ground that wasn\u2019t covered in rubble was difficult.\u201d Still, within a few weeks, they picked a spot, dug latrines, installed generators and water tanks, and erected tents. The clinic was close to the partition, where Israeli soldiers often fired their weapons. The team piled sandbags around the perimeter for protection.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On a hazy morning in November, a group of aid workers with M\u00e9decins Sans Fronti\u00e8res (M.S.F.), known in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":115006,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[33],"tags":[2717,496,3252,37],"class_list":["post-115005","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-israel","tag-doctors-without-borders","tag-gaza","tag-humanitarian-aid","tag-israel"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/116578080654467440","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115005","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=115005"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115005\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/115006"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=115005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=115005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=115005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}