HOSPITALS IN RUINS

A doctor witnesses what remains of a ravaged health-care system.

- BY CLAYTON DALTON

The author in Al-Aqsa Hospital, in central Gaza, on February 1st.

On January 29th, two weeks after Israel and Hamas agreed to a cease-fire, I crossed into Gaza as part of a twelve-person medical mission. After traversing southern Israel in a U.N. convoy, we followed an Israeli military escort through a maze of concrete barriers. Then we got out of our vehicles and lugged suitcases full of essentials—gauze, antibiotics, catheters, trauma shears—through a metal blast door. We passed a no man’s land of razor wire where, improbably, dandelions grew. Finally, we climbed into a van with a shattered windshield and drove to Khan Younis, a city of several hundred thousand in southern Gaza. Our driver swerved to avoid craters; almost every structure we passed was damaged. At one intersection, a minaret stood over a ruined mosque. Still, the city was alive. I saw a family drinking tea in a building with no roof. Laundry fluttered from balconies, and lettuce grew in the courtyard of a destroyed building. Nearly half of Gaza’s two million residents are children, and they were everywhere—laughing, waving, flying paper kites.

When I first signed up to work in Gaza, in late 2024, the Israeli military was carrying out more or less daily ground and air offensives. Wounded patients were overwhelming the region's barely functioning health-care system. I was expecting to hunker down in a single hospital and spend two weeks helping to treat them. Instead, when I arrived, Israeli forces had withdrawn from parts of Gaza, air strikes had largely stopped, and displaced families were returning to places they had fled. This meant that our view was not limited to the inside of one building. I would get an unusually complete picture of the state of Gaza’s medical infrastructure.