Local doctors struggle to provide humanitarian aid to Gaza
Many express sense of anguish after trying to gain access to region
Long before the current violence erupted in the Middle East, before airstrikes laid waste to vast swaths of Gaza and killed nearly 22,000 people, two women embraced on a dusty road near the Erez border crossing between Israel and Gaza.
The women — one a Harvard Medical School student and the other a Palestinian health care worker — would become devoted friends, sharing traditional meals in the Palestinian woman’s home in northern Gaza.
Now, those memories seem like a distant dream. In mid-October, the house where the women met was pulverized by a missile strike. Shards of glass and wood lay strewn across the living room, according to video footage shared by the family. And the Palestinian woman who hugged Dr. Lianet Vazquez at the border has, like 1.9 million other Gazans, been forced to flee her home.
“These are objectively heinous actions, and they have broken my heart,” said Vazquez, who returned to Boston two years ago and is now a resident physician at Massachusetts General Hospital.
As the humanitarian catastrophe worsens, so has the urge to act among Boston-area doctors, nurses, and other health care workers with ties to the Middle East. Some local physicians said they have been trying for weeks to enter Gaza to provide emergency medical care, but heavy bombardments have largely prevented aid groups from entering the war-torn enclave. Another group has organized a fastgrowing network of doctors to volunteer in Israel. In the meantime, scores of area physicians have taken to the streets — often wearing white lab coats and scrubs — to denounce attacks on civilians and to demand an immediate end to the Israeli action in Gaza.
The medical professionals have gone from being wary of voicing their concerns publicly to being among the most visible voices against the escalating bloodshed. More than 200 of these workers, organized under the group Healthcare Workers for Palestine, have signed an open letter to the state’s Congressional delegation demanding
an immediate cease-fire and calling attention to the attacks on Gaza’s hospitals and health care workers. Twenty-one of Gaza’s 36 hospitals have ceased to function, while 13 are “partially functioning,” according to a Dec. 27 statement from the World Health Organization. Gaza doctors have been performing amputations and other surgical procedures without anesthesia and using vinegar to treat wounds, according to media reports.
Dressed in a white coat and sneakers, Dr. Madhuri Rao, a family physician from Boston, hopped atop a stool and addressed hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters gathered on Tremont Street in Boston, outside of a Dec. 5 fund-raising event for President Biden’s reelection campaign.
“These days, I have been going into work thinking how on earth I could keep doing my job if the hospital and clinic were destroyed, if everything just stopped working and I just could not take care of my patients anymore, if I was uncertain whether my patients would live or die at the hands of violence,” Rao shouted, moments after Biden’s motorcade passed by the barricaded protest.
Privately, some local physicians have expressed a deepening sense of despair and hopelessness. There were recent discussions about organizing a telemedicine initiative to help Gazan health care workers, but that was deemed impractical because of recurring communication blackouts caused by Israeli airstrikes. Even if they could connect via phone or the internet, doctors would have limited ability to help when medications and other basic supplies are not available, said Dr. Lara Jirmanus, a primary care physician in Cambridge who has worked in Palestinian refugee camps.
Several doctors from the Boston area said they have sought to enter Gaza through Egypt but are awaiting permission from both Palestinian and Egyptian authorities.
Dr. Karameh Kuemmerle, a pediatric neurologist in Boston who grew up in the occupied West Bank, said her “bag is already packed” for a humanitarian trip to Gaza as soon as she receives permission. For now, she is focused on building political support at home. In early December, she flew to Washington, D.C., with an international group she cofounded called Doctors Against Genocide, to meet with members of Congress and demand an immediate cease-fire.
“As doctors, we swore an oath,” Kuemmerle said. “We can’t stand helpless when children are starved, dehydrated, and allowed no access to safety and medical care.”
This sense of moral outrage has permeated Boston’s medical community since the start of the war, which began when Hamas massacred 1,200 people and took some 240 Israeli hostages on Oct. 7. So far, more than 600 Americans who spend their days as surgeons, emergency room physicians, and in other specialties have enlisted to volunteer in Israel through a growing network, organized under the name IL-USDocAID. Their objective is to build a permanent medical relief organization that will survive the current war and respond to humanitarian crises across the globe, organizers said.
Dr. Yoav Golan, an infectious disease specialist at Tufts Medical Center, spent two weeks this fall embedded with Magen David Adom, the Israeli emergency service, in Sderot, an Israeli city near the Gaza border. Days before his arrival in early October, the city of 30,000 was overrun with Hamas militants who shot at civilians indiscriminately, according to videos.
“There are times in life when you need to stop what you are doing and do what’s right, regardless of your routine demands,” said Goav, a former paratrooper in the Israeli Defense Forces. “This is one of those times.”
Vazquez said she feels “incredibly blessed” to have worked in Gaza, though nearly two months of relentless bombardments have stirred painful memories.
The hospital where she worked as a medical student, the sprawling Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, was heavily damaged in November and is still barely functioning. Once the most advanced medical facility in Gaza, Al-Shifa now houses only a handful of doctors with 70 volunteers working under what visiting World Health Organization staff called “unbelievably challenging circumstances.” Patients with trauma injuries are being sutured on the hospital’s floor, with limited or no pain medications, according to a WHO statement.
The last time that Vazquez communicated with her Palestinian friend was on Oct. 10, and the news was agonizing: The woman sent a message saying she was unable to find milk for her 8-month-old son. Since then, accounts of her whereabouts have gone dark.
‘We can’t stand helpless when children are starved, dehydrated, and allowed no access to safety and medical care.’
DR. KARAMEH KUEMMERLE, a pediatric neurologist in Boston who grew up in the occupied West Bank