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Through a series of audio recordings, Jacob Burns, project coordinator for MSF, shares what he saw and experienced at the heart of the conflict during his first days on the ground. This recording was made on 22 December 2023.
Gaza is somewhere that I have worked before, and I knew that things were going to be different obviously coming back this time.
But I have to say that it was still a massive shock to cross at Rafah and immediately to find ourselves encircled by people looking in the cars to see if we were bringing food or water. Finding the streets of Rafah absolutely full of people building shelters. These camps in these fields with these sorts of shelters of fortune made out of this thin, almost transparent plastic sheeting.
Just this massive, overwhelming sensation of how desperate things have become here, after two-and-a-bit months of war.
One of the big problems here in Gaza is that there are so many people who've been wounded […] that the hospitals are chaotic. [Nasser] hospital is not really a hospital anymore, I would say, it's more like a camp.
The place is just filled with people milling around, trying to sleep, trying to find a corner to make their own, trying to find something to eat, to drink. So when people are coming in, the staff are literally kneeling in the blood on the floor to try to save the life of a person, even intubating on the floor which is just really, really extreme.So many people told me about the loss of relatives and sometimes it’s just an incredibly long list of people that they lost in Israeli airstrikes. I think the sentiment for many people I've talked to is that Gaza is gone basically, there's nothing left. It's difficult for them to see a life here again. Which is very, very sad".