New York (Quds News Network)- Tanya Haj Hassan, a paediatric intensive care doctor who addressed UN member states on the 2024 International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People on Tuesday, shared the harrowing realities faced by Palestinians in Gaza under Israel’s genocidal war.
“Palestinians don’t need our pity. They don’t need our praise. They need our meaningful and truthful solidarity,” she said.
Hassan conveyed witness accounts and stories from Palestinian healthcare workers, urging the world to listen to their experiences, move beyond pity and offer meaningful solidarity.
Hassan have worked in Gaza many times over the past decade, and most recently as part of an emergency medical team working in a hospital in Gaza’s middle area during the ongoing genocide.
As one of the few international observers allowed into Gaza, Hassan said, “Spend just 5 minutes in a hospital there and it will become painfully clear that Palestinians are being intentionally massacred, starved, and stripped of everything needed to sustain life.”
“Collectively, for the past 14 months, we have treated people subjected to civilian massacre after civilian massacre at the few remaining, partially-functioning, hospitals in Gaza.”
“Entire families have been eliminated, wiped off the civil registry. Our healthcare and humanitarian colleagues are being killed in record numbers.”
“We have treated countless children who lost their entire families, a phenomenon so frequent in Gaza that they have been given a specific name: Wounded Child No Surviving Family. We held the hands of children as they took their last breaths with no one but a stranger to comfort them. Those who recovered enough to leave hospital continued to face the obvious risk of death, be it through another bombing, starvation, dehydration, or disease.”
“History has clearly shown us that doctors cannot stop genocide. This is why it’s called the “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide”. And why I am here today,” Hassan added.
Messages from Healthcare Workers in Gaza
Hassan asked some of her colleagues in Gaza if they had messages they wanted her to convey during her address to the UN.
“Tell them that we are tired.. We are without homes…on the street…Our loved ones are gone and we are all stories.” This was a message sent to her by an ER nurse.
An intensive care doctor, besieged in Gaza and separated from his family, told her, “Tell them everything you came and saw with your eyes.” “Tell them that I want to see my wife and son, because I really miss them.”
Saed, a nurse who was detained and tortured by Israeli forces, told Hassan, “We are being buried, every minute we are being buried, every minute we disappear, every minute we are abducted, we are experiencing things that the mind cannot even comprehend. We die and don’t find anyone to bury us. I am asking you to share my story, my whole story, with my name. I want the whole world to know that I am a human being. At the end I am not pen on a paper, I am not anonymous, I am a human being created by God.”
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“Why aren’t Palestinians the ones speaking for our cause. Why are we not there and able to speak? The Palestinian people, the people in Gaza? Why not me, why not my neighbour, why not my colleague?”
Hassan added, “Our Palestinian colleagues are not here because the systems we currently exist in don’t recognize the value of Palestinian life.”
