‘We followed the rules, and they still attacked’
Canadian nurse says 28 days in Gaza have changed how she views the war
Amy Potter can still see the scarred face of an orphaned, homeless nine-year-old girl who screamed, through a brutal leg realignment procedure, “I want to die. I want to die. Let me die. Let me die.”
Potter, a 48-year-old emergency room nurse from Thunder Bay, came home late last month from a tour of Gaza with Doctors Without Borders (MSF), her head full of nightmares. Memories of children bleeding and breathless in a broken health system.
Potter was in Gaza for four weeks — as long as MSF allows conflict mission rotations to last because of how challenging they are. Her last two deployments were in Yemen in 2018 and Sierra Leone the year before.
Potter felt powerless in Gaza, she said, where there are no longer any fully functional hospitals. She recalls a father tasked due to medical staff shortages with manually pumping an airbag, every six seconds exactly, to force air into the lungs of his dying child.
What happened next she will never know. The child was not expected to survive, and so the cold calculus of emergency medicine forced Potter away.
But always, Potter said, the children of Gaza will remain with her. The kids whose parents she overheard lying to them, telling them they still have a home to go back to, that all their toys are still there, safe.
The children whom she saw digging through refuse and rubble for material to build kites, which they flew against a backdrop of billowing black smoke, under the thunder of gunfire and tank shelling and airstrikes pierced by the whine of 24hour surveillance drones.
The kids who, if they survive, are poised to endure the same hard lives as the 92-year-old Palestinian woman she spoke to who said she can’t recall how many wars she’s lived through, nor how many times she’d been forced from her home.
Potter grieves for the ordinary people in this war, whose homes became battlefields. Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, which killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, burned down farming communities, massacred concertgoers and kidnapped about 240 people, was a travesty, Potter said.
But Israel’s response, its siege that has plunged hundreds of thousands into starvation and sickness and killed over 30,000 more, is its own grave injustice, she said.
“People don’t have access to food. They don’t have access to water. They live in crowded conditions. The mental trauma they’re going through, as a society, is something we can’t fathom. Right now, we have mental health workers with MSF who can only do what we call ‘psychological first aid’ … So many kids are the only person left in their entire family.”
Once, Potter was an advocate for a temporary humanitarian pause in the Israel-Hamas war, so that aid channels could widen, hostages could be released and civilians could get the food, water and health care they so desperately need, before Israel resumed its stated goal of purging Hamas.
But being embedded in Gaza shook her from that. There needs to be an immediate, permanent ceasefire, Potter said. This crisis has taken too much from the people there, she said, for it to go on any longer. She has seen the innocents in Gaza, including MSF staff, shot down, starved, suffering.
“The people I saw, they’re not fighting, they’re not part of this war,” said Potter. “They can’t flee. They’re just trying to survive. Every staff member I work with has lost friends and family, often several. Most have lost their homes. A lot of them have physical scars. All of them have some form of post traumatic stress.”
Potter believed she was insulated from battle because Israel knew their location at all times. She and other MSF volunteers lived in a concrete shelter called the “beach house.” There, they talked about how civilian suffering in Gaza was among the worst they’d ever seen across their many tours of the Middle East and Africa going back decades.
When they travelled to tend to the wounded, often in a mobile clinic that helped several hundred people a day, Israel knew. So too when they piled the critically injured into donkey carts to ferry them for more complex care.
Only now does Potter realize how much danger she was in. As she was heading out of Gaza, another MSF logo-emblazoned beach house down the road from hers was shot at and fired on by an Israeli tank. The wife and daughter-in-law of an MSF staff member were killed and six other people were injured, including children, some with severe burns to their faces and hands, Potter said.
“These killings underscore the grim reality that nowhere in Gaza is safe, that promises of safe areas are empty and deconfliction mechanisms unreliable,” said MSF general director Meinie Nicolai in a statement about the attack. “The amount of force being used in densely populated urban environments is staggering, and targeting a building knowing it is full of humanitarian workers and their families is unconscionable.”
MSF said no prior warning for the attack was given and that the Israeli army had been “clearly informed of the precise location” of its shelter. Israel told Agence France-Presse it attacked the charity safe house because it identified “terror activity” in it. The army said it regretted the harm that came to the civilians inside.
“We did everything right, we followed the rules, and they still attacked an MSF staff house,” said Potter.
“I know the staff member whose family was killed. He was fantastic. He worked every day. He was with me every morning from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. He helped make a building that has grown into a functioning clinic. There’s no reason he should have ever been attacked.”
More than half the buildings in Gaza have been destroyed. Gaza’s largest city is a mess of craters. Most of the enclave’s people have been corralled into Rafah, its southernmost city, where they live in desperation. Potter said she fears for them if Israel’s planned invasion happens.
“This needs to be over,” she said. “There’s nowhere else to go. The devastation is unbelievable.”
While the resilience of the displaced in Rafah Potter has met is remarkable, she said, some can strive no longer. They have resigned themselves to death. Some people, Potter said, have taken to walking north, toward the fighting, so that if they must die, at least it will be at home.
Their journey is a microcosm of the war, Potter said. “We’re marching toward ultimate demise here if we don’t stop.”