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“He just showed up, and he looked so numb. I thought he just needed help, and he needed some directions, but he said that he was at home, and a bomb landed, his daughter was in the bathroom, and he went back to find her remains, and he just found her head, and bits and pieces of her arm and leg, and put them in a burlap bag, and brought her to the hospital to be buried, and he was just looking for directions to the morgue. And I was just horrified. I was aghast by what I was seeing, but for the locals, their attitude was, this is, this is Gaza. This is what we see every day. This is really not a big deal, and for me, the fact that those sorts of scenes are normalized, I don't think a horror movie could fictionalize how these scenes are any more sick, twisted and disturbing.”
Dr. Samer Attar

Interviewer (Christiane Amanpour): Dr. Attar, welcome back to the program. Thank you. It has to be said, no rest for the weary, because you have come back from all of that heavy work in Gaza, immediately into working at the hospital. I think you’re joining us on your lunch break.
Dr. Attar: Yeah, but that’s all good. I had a day of rest, I ate a lot, I slept a lot, spent some time outside and I’m recalibrated.
Interviewer: All right. This was not your first trip to Gaza, and we’ve spoken about what you’ve encountered before. Just tell me, because it’s been two months of a total siege and constant bombardment. And we hear so many reports, international correspondence can’t get in. What is it like for you trying to treat the civilians?
Dr. Attar: Yeah, this was my sixth time, and it gets worse every time. And I mean, I don’t know where to start. My first night, they had bombing where 60 civilians were killed, and they had about 200 wounded, and the emergency room is just overflowing with patients. There were patients on the floor. There was an eight-year-old boy who was gasping with blood, foaming at the nose and the mouth, and then next to him was a six-year-old girl. Her head was open with her brains exposed. Her intestines were falling out of her belly, and those are what they call hopeless cases. They’re just put on the floor, and all I could do is tell their family members, just hold their hands, because they’re not going to make it. They’re going to die. But when you have 50 more people who are being assessed and triaged, you have to prioritize and move on. And the local doctors that I worked with, for them, this is how they’ve been living for the past 18 months, and they’re really good at it. They really know how to save lives. But the psychological torment of just seeing, I remember a ten-year-old girl, her leg was hanging on by just the threads of spaghetti, and she underwent an amputation of her leg. So it never gets easy.

Interviewer: No, no. I’m sure it really doesn’t. We have seen the pictures that you’re sending, and we’re going to show another one now. Because I wonder if you’re noticing different kinds of injuries, and people come to you trying to, I mean, practically with various different bits of their blown-up family members. We have a picture, which I’m going to actually ask you to explain. It’s a man carrying the partial remains of his daughter in a bag, and we do have the sound as he was describing it, and then we’ll talk to you about it.

Voice over translates man in video: Yesterday, we were baking, and children were around me, beside the toilet. Two missiles fell on the building beside. Today, I went to look and found her under the rubble, marred and torn into pieces. Dogs torn her apart. I found the head, hand, and foot. May God have mercy on her.

Interviewer: Doctor Attar, I just… I mean, how did you respond? He was… He was… You know, he came to you, and it’s just physically incredible to watch a father hold a discarded aid bag full of his child.
Dr. Attar: Yeah, that was a tough night. The night before, we had about 30 people killed, and about 100 wounded, and they said there were many more still buried under the rubble, and we worked for 24 hours straight, and it happened more than once, and you can barely stand, but that was the morning, and we were just hoping things were quiet, and things were quiet, but he just showed up, and he looked so numb. I thought he just needed help, and he needed some directions, but he said that he was at home, and a bomb landed, his daughter was in the bathroom, and he went back to find her remains, and he just found her head, and bits and pieces of her arm and leg, and put them in a burlap bag, and brought her to the hospital to be buried, and he was just looking for directions to the morgue. And I was just horrified. I was aghast by what I was seeing, but for the locals, their attitude was, this is, this is Gaza. This is what we see every day. This is really not a big deal, and for me, the fact that those sorts of scenes are normalized, I don’t think a horror movie could fictionalize how these scenes are any more sick, twisted and disturbing.
Interviewer: You know, of course, the Israelis continue to insist that they’re just looking for Hamas. And we now hear from the Washington Post reporting that they are saying that Israel is dramatically altering Gaza’s map, declaring about 70 percent of the enclave either a military zone or under evacuation orders, pushing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians into what appears to be an ever-dwindling territory. Have you, were you able to see any of that, and how did it impact, you know, the conditions people are under?
Dr. Attar: Yeah, you see people living in tents, you see people living in the rubble of their homes, and they’ve moved six, seven, eight times, and many of them are just living out of bags. They have very little, there’s not a lot of food, there’s not a lot of water, every day is a scramble for food and for water. The hospitals are these little oases, almost like, I guess you could call palaces in the middle of an apocalyptic wasteland of dust and rubble, because they run on generators sometimes, but even they’re running out of supplies.
Interviewer: And what about a day in the life of the hospital you were in, the Al-Ahli hospital, it was struck in the middle of April, and various reports say it was the last fully functioning hospital. Just tell me about, you know, what you had to do after that strike, and what is the amount of aid and hospital care that still exists in Gaza?
Dr. Attar: Well, the Al-Ahli hospital at the time was the main trauma hospital for Gaza City, so that’s where I was based. I was working with local surgeons. So that was the hospital that saved lives. If you got injured, you were brought to Al-Ahli to the emergency doctors there, and you had a triage, they knew how to perform life-saving procedures, and then you had to get people to the operating room quickly, and they knew who wasn’t going to make it. But the night I was there, I just, I got woke up by one of the nurses screaming at me to go to run, and I didn’t really know what was going on. There was misinformation that the army was invading, that they were going to bomb the hospital, but when I came downstairs, there were about, still about 40 to 50 patients, and these are, a lot of them little kids, they had amputations, broken bones, they’re with their families, so about 100 people left in the building. And so, me and just a handful of nurses, we decided we didn’t really know what was happening, but we just decided we were going to stay with them because if the hospital was going to get bombed, we decided we were going to die with our patients taking care of them, not running away from them. And then the hospital did get hit, and portions of the ceiling collapsed on us. We thought we all thought we were going to get buried alive in the building, but all we felt were the reverberations and shockwaves from the building that was hit next to us. And when that happened, for about seven hours, we were sort of cut off, trying to figure out what was going on, and then when morning came, daylight came, we saw staff trickling back into the hospital, and the hospital was out of service in the sense that we could no longer take care of anybody injured, so they were bringing in people injured off the streets, but because we had no emergency room, no emergency department, people that could have been saved were packed into ambulances and driven to another hospital about two to three miles away. And as of now, Ahli is still trying to pick up the pieces, all they’re doing is they’re just taking care of the patients that are currently there, but the hospital has no capacity to take care of the acutely injured.
Interviewer: Yeah, and we’ve got actually pictures of you there, you know, doing, you know, drilling a pin into a gentleman’s arm, and then there’s a picture of you placing a pediatric chest tube. You say, of course, that’s not in the wheelhouse of an orthopedic surgeon, which you are, but in Gaza, anything goes. And so I just wonder also, they say that no medicine is coming in, no food, no water. What is the actual conditions as the international aid agencies, the UN-based agencies are saying they’re running out of everything?
Dr. Attar: Well, yeah, they’re rationing, they’re running out. So, that video of me putting in the pin, yeah, I’m not wearing a surgical gown, there are no surgical drapes, I’m just wearing gloves, and I’m putting, drilling a pin into a man’s bone, and that’s not ideal, but they’re running out of that stuff, and they have to preserve it for when they think they actually need it. And they’re concerned is that they’re going to get to zero, and they won’t have any more of it. And the way we see it, we’re just, as a doctor, an American doctor, I’m just, I’m not, we’re not the main characters, we’re just supporting actors, and we’re just there to help and assist the locals. But the locals are just saying they don’t have enough, and they’re running, they’re pretty much running on fumes, and using what little they have. But it’s not ideal to do, for example, an orthopedic surgery with no gowns and no surgical drapes. It’s always not ideal when you have an orthopedic surgeon putting in a pediatric chest tube, but when you have 50 people, and you’re trying to help as many as you can, people just chip in wherever they can.

Interviewer: I wonder what, after all these trips, you know, the emotional toll is for you, and whether you come back and you bring these stories and your pictures to your elected representatives, you know, your congresspeople and your senators, and I don’t know what sort of an answer you get, or even to Israeli authorities on your way out.
Dr. Attar: I mean, all I can do is say what I’m seeing, so it’s a small, small world and none of us stand alone, there are a lot of people and a lot of pain, and if all it means for me is to show up and be a doctor and bear witness to suffering and then tell people what I’m seeing, if that lays one small brick towards a foundation of peace and healing, then to me that’s worth it. But that’s pretty much all I can say is what I’m witnessing.
Interviewer: Do you, and it’s important, do you intend to go back?
Dr. Attar: I hope so. I hope so, like I said, if given the opportunity and the privilege to help and make a difference, I think anyone would do it.
Interviewer: Well, maybe not anybody, but there are a lot of phenomenally dedicated doctors and humanitarians as like yourself, and thank God for that. Dr. Attar, thank you very much indeed for joining us from your hospital in Chicago, where I guess you’re going back on shift again any minute now.
Dr. Attar: Yeah, I’m at Northwestern and I’m going to get back to clinic. All right. Thank you for making time.

Mass CasualtyExplosive InjuriesChildrenPsychological TraumaForced DisplacementAid DistributionHospital ConditionsMedical SuppliesAl Ahli Baptist Hospital