A nurse from the US who was in Gaza with Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said that some of her team members stayed there even though they risked their lives.
Emily Callahan returned to the US last week after working in Gaza since August. She got out on Wednesday. She spoke to CNN on Monday and said that she witnessed many Palestinians with serious wounds and living in bad conditions because of the Israeli attacks. Israel is at war with Hamas, a terrorist group that rules Gaza.
“I saw kids with big burns on their faces, necks, and limbs, and the hospitals were so crowded that they had to let them go right away,” Callahan said to CNN’s Anderson Cooper.
“And they went back to these camps where there was no water. There are 50,000 people in that camp now and only four toilets, and they get two hours of water every 12 hours,” she said, Callahan said that one of her colleagues, a nurse, was killed in the first weekend of the war after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7.
“He was killed when the ambulance outside the hospital blew up,” she said. When she received the order to leave Gaza, she texted her hospital staff to see if they wanted to come with her.
“I asked, ‘Did any of you move south? Did any of you get out? Are any of you coming this way?’” she said. “And the only answer I got was, ‘This is our home. This is our family. These are our friends. If they’re going to kill us, we’re going to die saving as many people as we can.’”
Now, she said she is worried about her colleagues every day.
“Every morning I wake up and I text them and I ask, ‘Are you alive?’” she said. “And every night before I go to bed I text them again and I say, ‘Are you alive?’”
Israel has been bombing Gaza heavily since it declared war on Hamas on October 8.
On Sunday, Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said he would not stop the war until he got back the hostages.
Hamas has taken more than 240 hostages since it started the war in October, according to the Israeli army. Four hostages have been freed by Hamas, and one was saved by the Israeli soldiers.
“We say this to our friends and to our enemies. We will keep going until we beat them. We have no choice,” Netanyahu said to Israeli troops at an air base in the south of Israel on Sunday.
The war has killed and hurt many people on both sides. More than 1,400 Israelis have died, and Gaza officials say that more than 10,000 Palestinians have died, including more than 4,000 children.
The war has also made more than 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza and 200,000 Israelis leave their homes.