Hi, I’m Sophie Hurwitz, an editorial fellow here at Mother Jones.
A little over a month ago, I started talking to two medical students in Gaza on WhatsApp. Their names are Nermeen, 21, and Hasan, 22.
Last week, as I was texting them about their daily lives, you may have read our coverage of Gaza as a political issue at the Democratic National Convention. There were continued protests, as my colleague Noah Lanard and I reported, pushing for an arms embargo, and—more immediately—for a Palestinian American speaker on the DNC stage.
As I saw the political battle over even listening to an American talk about Palestine play out, Nermeen and Hasan texted me about their inability to sleep through the sounds and smoke of nearby bombs. The dissonance struck me. Perhaps it will you, too.
Today, at Mother Jones, you can read about these Gazan young people’s lives, pieced together from hours of WhatsApp conversations, voice memos, and photos from inside Gaza European Hospital. There are incredible pieces of audio in the piece, both mundane and piercing, of Nermeen talking about her life.
The article is, in particular, about these students' heroic medical work. After Nermeen’s and Hasan’s schools were bombed, they began volunteering as frontline doctors at Gaza European Hospital. There they essentially functioned as attending physicians in an environment that would strain even the most weathered of surgeons.
This is now a common practice in Gaza. “The health care system’s on the verge of collapsing,” Salman Dasti, an American anesthesiologist who volunteered at Gaza European Hospital, told me. “It’s being propped up because of students.” At one point, a doctor estimated that half the staff of an emergency room in Gaza was composed of student volunteers.
Doing this work, Nermeen explained, was the “one positive amid all of this”—she was living her dream of working as a doctor, even though shifts often lasted late into the night, and bombs shook the walls of the hospital. (Nermeen used to watch videos on YouTube of medical school graduations; she was so excited about one day being a physician.)
I hope you’ll take a few moments to read their words and hear their voices.
—Sophie Hurwitz
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