"I don't think I have enough words to describe the cruelty that is happening"

Karin Huster works as a nurse for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). She has visited Gaza three times since the start of the war, almost five months.

“It's kind of hard for me not to cry about this because I don't think I have seen an army that has been so vicious and so non-stop in its aggression towards a civilian population and most specifically towards children and women who we all know very well have nothing to do with the original aim of the Israeli army which was to get rid of Hamas. 

The number of children and women that we see in the emergency rooms of the hospital that we work in is just mind-boggling and the number of kids who I have seen with amputated arms or legs or kids who were killed is just mind-boggling. 

In June, I was working at Al-Aqsa [hospital]. I was responsible for the medical activities there and the Israeli forces came into Nuseirat to free four hostages. When they did so, they killed, called them collateral damage, I don't know, but well over 300 people. I was in the emergency room. 

We were asked by the director of the hospital to come in and it was as if I had a 747 in the emergency room. There were people of all ages. It was hundreds of people dead, not dead, legs blown off, people that were being intubated on the floor, chest tubes being put with no infection prevention control. 

It was just complete chaos. 

This is inside the Al-Aqsa Hospital, in the emergency hospital. This is in intensive care. You know, this is in the red zone area. As you can see, there are no... There are no beds right now. It's complete chaos. You have people who are being intubated, cared for on the ground. This person in front of us is dead or is going to die any minute. 

And it was such chaos that we had to... I had to push these bodies to the side so that we could bring more bodies to take care of. 

It was, you know, just something that I had not seen before. But just the sheer number of casualties overwhelms any hospital. And Al-Aqsa had been the one standing hospital in Deir al-Balah. And so it was receiving all the casualties of all the Israeli strikes. 

Every casualty, every death, will come to Al-Aqsa Hospital where they are counted and recorded and then wrapped in a body bag or body cloth. And they will be laid in front of the hospital and all the men will stand in front of the bodies and will pay their last respects. And so this doesn't last very long, but it's done with every single body that comes into Al-Aqsa Hospital. That it came dead or that it died in the hospital, eventually the bodies will make their way here and they will have this prayer that lasts a few minutes. And then the families will take the bodies and will bury them. But it is a fact of life. This happens all the time. And people sometimes don't even pay attention. 

The catastrophic deterioration of the humanitarian and medical situation in Gaza is a direct result of Israel's indiscriminate bombing and extensive restrictions and obstruction of aid over the past year. 

The obstruction of the Israeli forces is constant and it's on supply, on medical equipment, for example. We are constantly lacking essential medication, antibiotics, gauze, tools to do surgeries. We're lacking food. Food is being prevented from coming in. Of course, people will try to go and take whatever food is there from wherever they find it. 

So this one is particularly shocking to me because when I came in January, this beach didn't have a single tent when I was there in January. In fact, I rode in a car with a patient that was critically sick at 100 kilometers an hour on this road. Today, I cannot ride more than 10 kilometers an hour on this road because there are tents everywhere. 

The population of Rafah, which was about 1.4, 1.5 million people because of all the people who had moved from the north to Rafah, that population then was pushed back to the middle area, and then they were doing a yo-yo. But there is no space, not only because the buildings are destroyed but also because there is just no infrastructure. So where have people gone? They have gone on the beach, on the sand. They have... And as you can see on the picture, they don't have tents. They don't have any structure that is going to withhold the elements. They have a carpet. They have old mattresses. They have a piece of plastic, a few pieces of wood that stand the whole thing together. And today, the whole beach is jam-packed with those flimsy structures. And it's winter now and the storms in Gaza are nasty. 

You have kids who are on the brink of malnutrition. They live in insalubrious conditions. They will get super sick because of the elements. 

In recent months, MSF applied for 32 children and their caretakers to be medically evacuated from Gaza to Jordan. Only six were allowed to leave. 

When it comes to taking patients and having them taken care of, cared for, managed in other countries because the capacity in Gaza is no longer there, it is mind-boggling to me that the Israeli forces and the Israeli government continue to block the medical evacuations of those patients. We're talking about children with cancer. We're talking wounded with devastating injuries, but that can be salvageable. We're talking about children with amputations that can be much better managed outside of Gaza. We're talking about all kinds of medical conditions that should be allowed to be treated outside, yet are not. 

Why forbid a four-year-old child to leave the enclave when they know very well that this child has no hope of survival?

Because of the war that's going on, they should be able to leave. And the governments of Europe, of the United States, of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, there are so many countries that should be able to take these patients. It's the only human thing to do, it seems to me, yet we're not seeing at all any visible effort, any goodwill, any genuine interest of the rest of the world to take care of these people. And that has nothing to do with politics. That has just to do with being a human being and caring for others. 

The medical consequences of patients who are unable to leave are obviously catastrophic. Already the future for them is bleak, but the future without both legs, without the hope of getting treated in a hospital that has everything for you to be treated, the consequences are catastrophic for those people. This is just terrible.

I don't think I have enough words to describe the cruelty that is happening. 

And this is not one family. This is one family after one family after one family after one family. But overall, when I look at the list and when I see the conditions for which people are asking to leave, yes, they need to be taken care of somewhere else because the [medical] capacity inside of Gaza is gone. It's been obliterated by the Israeli forces. Willingly. Like, willingly.

Schools, universities, mosques, hospitals. Everything is destroyed. Everything. So that you cannot stay. You can't stay because there is nothing to stay for. 

So this is a picture of a building. Like many other buildings in Khan Younis. I took this photo while driving to Nasser Hospital. And as it happens in Gaza, there are a lot of graffiti inside of destroyed buildings or on big slabs of wall that have been destroyed. And what I have been told is that when there is somebody who is still under the rubble, who has not been able to be taken out, to be buried, they will often do a painting of that person. I don't think this is something that happens all the time, but this is something that they do regularly. So here on the first floor is graffiti of a woman. 

Since 6 October 2024, the governorate of North Gaza has been under continuous attack and siege by the Israeli forces. The level of destruction in the north is, if we can imagine, even worse than the level of destruction in Rafah or Khan Younis. I think, for me, even when I look at Khan Younis or at Rafah today, it's not possible to rebuild those places. 

It is destroyed beyond reconstruction. 

People live in their destroyed homes. They will put a carpet, they will put, you know, whatever it is that they can, and then they live there. There is no working, nothing, but this is their home and that's where they want to stay. And what's worse is to think that this apocalypse is man-made and is willingly made. There is nothing that was left to chance, and it continues to be the case that none of this destruction is left to chance. I mean, you know, they live on borrowed time. 

It's a matter of time before you die in Gaza. 

So this picture of these little feet are... They're little feet of a baby during the June attack when the Israeli forces went to free the four hostages in Nuseirat. And this was one of the victims of the Israeli strikes. When I was in Al-Aqsa Hospital when I came into the emergency room, there were, I don't know, hundreds of people lying on the floor, but there was this little kid. I think she was, I don't know, maybe two years old, three years old, and she just seemed to be sleeping. 

She was, you know, in like the fetal position all alone, and we all know that Palestinian families, they are always there with their children. Their children are, you know, God. So you don't leave a kid on its own. But somehow this kid was there on her own, nobody paying attention to her. And so I'm a mom, so I went to this kid, obviously, because everybody else had somebody with them, and she seemed to be sleeping. And so then I went to talk to a nurse who said that she'd had a head injury, and she was probably not doing very well. 

She was sleeping, but maybe in a coma, I didn't know. And even though I knew I couldn't do very much for her, and there were other patients that I probably needed to do something else, you know, something for, I just wanted to take this kid in my arms and, you know, just stay there and do nothing. But it was, you know, always that day will be for me this child that was seemingly sleeping all alone on the floor, you know, blood everywhere on, you know, people screaming, and this kid just standing there, or not standing, but lying there and doing, you know, doing nothing in the middle of a ton of noise."