The doctors of Gaza die of hunger by fighting to save lives, Evacuured Medic tells the BBC

For two decades, his work and his goal in life were to heal people. But Dr. Mohammed Abu Mughaisib also wanted to stay alive.

So when he couldn’t even take care of himself anymore, and hunger was too much to bear, he took a rare chance of leaving Gaza.

“I would never have imagined hungry,” said Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) Medic.

“But my head hurt me and I was in my stomach in famine.”

After working in the Gaza hospitals in the past two years, Dr Abu Mughaisib has been evacuated to Ireland in mid-September, as well as a group of students occupying scholarships.

Security and nourished, he is now able to think about his time working in increasingly disastrous conditions, because the offensive of Israel has destroyed medical and other infrastructure – and how he thinks of leaving colleagues behind.

“The decision was very difficult,” he said, seated in a peaceful park in Dublin-with a soundtrack of bird singing, rather than balls, drones and explosions.

The contrast between the two worlds was almost overwhelming for him.

“I am physically here but my heart and my soul are in Gaza,” he said. “It’s very strange to see people living a normal life, and it will take time to get used to it.”

“I am happy that I am surviving. Because I could have been killed or injured at any time. But I am sad to have left my colleagues and my people.”

Dr. Abu Mughaisib was in charge of operations for the international medical charitable in the Gaza Strip, including all its hospitals, clinics and mental health services. It is one of the largest medical service providers in Gaza.

He has struggled to put into words the “indescribable” consequences for his colleagues from the last two years of war, the offensive of Israel leaving the Hospitals of Gaza under strong pressure, some forced to close and others operating at considerably reduced levels.

He told me about doctors forced to sip a glucose solution just to give himself a little energy to continue working.

At one point, among doctors and nurses, the only subject of conversation in the hospital was food and desperate hunting. “Hungry doctors dealt with malnutrition,” he said.

And the injured continued to come.

“When you enter a hospital, you feel blood,” he told me.

“Hospitals are supposed to be holy places, sterile places, but in Gaza, it’s like going to a public market. Patients are literally lying on the ground because there are no beds for them.

“There are not enough doctors to take care of them. In the intensive care unit, they are waiting for someone to die, to admit another critical patient.”

He adds: “I hope you can have access to see what’s going on in these hospitals in Gaza. It’s horrible.”

Foreign journalists are prohibited by Israel to enter independently to Gaza, so that press organizations, including the BBC, are counting on local freezing freelancers to present themselves from the field.

The 52 -year -old has lost the account of the number of times he has been moved since the war that Israel was launched in retaliation for the attacks led by Hamas on October 7, 2023.

These attacks were “totally unacceptable” and shocked it, he said.

He said that his large house in Gaza City – who had a barbecue and a picnic table on the lawn – was taken up as an Israeli military base and then looted by the local population.

Dr. Abu Mughaisib managed to evacuate his family in Egypt in February 2024, while he was behind.

“I lived in a tent. I lived in the hospital. I lived in the MSF office. I put my mattress in the electricity room of a restaurant.”

But wherever he was, he continued to work.

Fear accompanied her everywhere. “Whenever I walked in the street, I was very terrified and I was looking around, looking at people, because I didn’t know who was Hamas,” he said.

“And I thought, ok this guy, maybe he wanted, maybe they (Israel) will target him. And they will kill everyone.”

Each day has brought moral dilemmas to how to treat the wounded.

“What patient do you admit? You decide that you can only take children, but they are mainly children, so you prefer to take care of?”

“The situation is beyond the description,” he added.

More than 18,000 of the 66,000 people that the Ministry of Health managed by Hamas recorded during the war are children. The UN considers these reliable figures.

And while Israel continues its offensive in Gaza City, the UN says that attacks on and around hospitals have left sick and injured civilians anywhere to go for vital treatment.

According to the United Nations Human Rights Office, there have been at least 17 Israeli attacks in or close to health establishments in the Gaza Strip in the second part of September alone.

“There was no sign that he was aimed at Hamas,” said Dr. Abu Mughaisib. “These are civilians, the population, me, my friends, my colleagues, my neighbors, they are not Hamas.

“We are those who were killed and injured and run from one place to another and hungry.”

Israel says that it takes measures to reduce civilian victims and reproaches Hamas for using civilians as human shields.

Dr. Abu Mughaisib said he knew that Israel’s reprisals for October 7 attacks would be massive. But he never imagined his scale, describing it as an “attack on each life layer in Gaza, infrastructure, electricity, water supply, sewer system, hospitals, schools and universities”.

He told me that people in Gaza are so desperate that they will die their elderly parents to save them.

“I still have colleagues under the rubble,” he said.

At least 13 MSF employees have been killed in the past two years. The last one, a nurse who died from the bursts of shells of an Israeli air strike near her tent in September.

As a security now of the war in Gaza, Dr. Abu Mughaisib appreciated his first appropriate shower in almost two years.

But after dreaming for weeks to eat, now that there is food all around him, he has no appetite.

“Of course, I am happy to leave. But I don’t appreciate this happiness. When I know my colleagues suffer, I can’t eat a good meal.”

He left Gaza with only his mobile phone and the clothes he wore. Nothing else was authorized.

He was told that the Israelis had strictly prohibited evacuated from taking sand or the land of Gaza.

And he is convinced that it was for a reason: “So there is no evidence that you come from Gaza. You have no connection with Gaza. You have no memories of Gaza.”

“I wanted to take all Gaza with me,” he said. “Not just a little.”

He said that the destruction in Gaza is so extensive that the cities he passed while he was leaving through the border crossing with Egypt was completely unrecognizable.

I asked him if he thought Gaza would never heal.

“It will be very difficult,” he replied.

“The wounds are not only physical. They are social, psychological, emotional and spiritual.

“Everything is lost.”

Healing will take a long time, he said.

“And I think people will need the support of the world to heal them.”

Additional reports by Imogen Anderson