When Dr. Adil Husain finally reached the hospital in Gaza, he told the staff he didn’t mind working 12-hour shifts.
They laughed.
“You’re not going to survive more than four-hour bursts,” they told him.
Husain, a 32-year-old emergency room doctor who lives in Dallas, was part of a group that called themselves “the Gaza Six”: six doctors from around the world who’d traveled to volunteer at Nasser Hospital — the last fully functioning facility of its kind in the area.
His team did as recommended. Husain worked four hours at a time with brief breaks in between, always surrounded by the sound of bombs and the site of bloodied bodies anywhere there was room: on beds, the floor, and propped against walls.
Almost every day included a mass casualty incident. On the morning of June 12, the day Husain’s team crossed the border into the West Bank, 24 civilians were killed and 200 were wounded in an attack by the Israeli military near a humanitarian aid distribution center, Al Jazeera reported. That night, 28 people — including four children —- were killed by Israeli airstrikes, while another 24 were shot trying to get food. The next day, 20 were killed by more airstrikes.
When mass casualty incidents hit fully-staffed hospitals in the United States, they overwhelm doctors and nurses, deplete blood supplies, and cost billions per year. But those doctors have a wealth of resources — and safe homes to return to at night — that Nasser’s doctors don’t.
What’s more, the World Health Organization has warned that Gaza’s health system is on the brink of collapse after “relentless and systematic decimation of hospitals.” Reports from the United Nations, Gazan health authorities, and watchdog groups say Palestinian healthcare workers have been targeted, killed, detained, and tortured. And in June, as Husain’s team arrived, the WHO said the Nasser Medical Complex was at risk of becoming non-functional.
Many experts — including the UN — have called Israel’s 21-month war in Gaza a genocide. In the first year, more than two-thirds of Gaza’s cropland was damaged, the UN found. The food and medical supplies that reach Gazans often can’t meet the demand, and nearly every day, dozens of people are killed at the aid sites. Nearly 100 were killed as recently as Sunday while grabbing sacks of flour from UN World Food Programme trucks, per NPR.
“This is a man-made starvation,” Husain told The Barbed Wire (a claim backed up by human rights organizations, including Amnesty International).
Most of the mass casualty incidents Husain experienced happened in the morning, when people — including more children than Husain could count — were shot trying to get a meal for their family.
“A lot of times they would have empty bags in their shirts or in their pants so that they could just fill it and then come back home,” he said. “But not only do they have empty bags with no food, but they’re left with life-threatening injuries or death.”
The Israel Defense Forces say they try to avoid killing civilians, and they’ve chalked up some of the deaths to “technical error.” But this — to put it mildly — contradicts what Husain and other doctors have seen.
Doctors like Husain are experiencing a reality few can imagine and many continue to deny exists, despite first-person accounts, photos, and videos of the violence. As the few remaining journalists in Gaza — including Pulitzer Prize finalists working for the Agence France-Presse — face the brink of starvation, visiting physicians are thrust into roles as messengers while coping with the horrors they witnessed.
They’re sharing their stories with the world, and for Husain, that means focusing on our shared humanity.
There was the ER nurse who traveled an hour and a half on his day off to give Husain a parting present: a bottle of cologne. There were the children who smiled wide when given chocolate, then licked the foil clean. And there was the grieving mother who, after a horrific loss, extended a grace toward Husain he’ll never forget.
“I felt honored to even be there, to be around these types of people,” Husain said.
After returning to Texas, Husain told The Barbed Wire about the people he met — the ones he lost and the ones he saved.
He can’t stop thinking about all of them.
‘Our Last Phone Calls. Just in Case.’
Husain moved to Texas just two years ago after completing his medical residency in New York. He likes working in the ER at Medical City Dallas Hospital, and he likes Dallas. The suburbs north of the city feel like a great place to raise a family, and six months ago, he and his wife welcomed their first child: a baby girl. He’s happy, but ever since October 2023, when the war in Gaza began, he’s also felt called to do something more.
“Just seeing all these people suffer for so long, I knew I wanted to go,” Husain told The Barbed Wire.
Then in April, he saw a volunteer opportunity with Rahma Worldwide, an international humanitarian organization, and his application was promptly accepted. He was going to be sent, for two weeks in June, to Nasser Hospital, which has been attacked multiple times by Israeli forces.
“Nasser truly is the last quaternary care hospital in Gaza, as in, someone comes through that door, and any service that’s needed can be done,” said Aziz Rahman, a 36-year-old interventional radiologist from Milwaukee and another volunteer with the “Gaza Six.”
“God forbid, Nasser gets invaded, you’re just pretty much looking at little urgent care clinics everywhere,” he added.
The “Gaza Six” was originally much larger. More than a dozen doctors flew into Jordan and met up at a hotel the night of June 11, though none of them knew for certain if they’d be allowed to travel any further. Israeli authorities ultimately decide which medical personnel can enter the West Bank. All but six of Husain’s original group were told to go home without a clear reason why.
“They were distraught,” Husain said of those who couldn’t go any further. “They just flew back home.”
In addition to Husain and Rahman, the “Gaza Six” included an internal medicine doctor from Chicago; a cardiothoracic surgeon from Jordan; an ER doctor from Eugene, Oregon; and an anesthesiologist from Algeria.
Mark Brauner, the ER doctor from Eugene, told The Barbed Wire he took out a life insurance policy and activated it the moment he knew he was moving on from Jordan to Gaza. It comforted him to learn that Husain, a fellow emergency physician, was part of his group. It also helped that Husain, in Brauner’s words, is an “affable, sweet person.”
“He’s got this great balance of being very humble, but being assertive at the same time,” Brauner told The Barbed Wire. “And it was really cool to watch, because he practices at a much higher level than you would expect with somebody with the number of years of experience that he has.”
Husain is just two years out from having completed his residency, the training program all doctors finish after medical school. Brauner, 60, had been on medical service trips before, including a stint in Haiti after the earthquake in 2010. This service trip was Husain’s first, though he’s not sure if having more experience would have made a difference.
Many doctors who have returned home from similar trips to Gaza have said nothing could have prepared them for what they saw, regardless of how long they’ve worked in medicine. Doctors told Politico they were forced to do things they would’ve never done in the U.S., including operate on children without consent. Other physicians, like Dr. Nick Maynard from Oxford, England, have made several trips to Gaza since October 2023. Each time, he said, conditions have worsened.
Even before he got to Nasser Hospital, Husain called his wife, his college sweetheart, for what he feared was the last time.
He and the other volunteers were at the King Hussein Bridge crossing, a busy border between Jordan and the West Bank, when their volunteer coordinator texted to say almost all of Khan Younis was under evacuation notice: Bombs could be on the way.
That’s where they were headed.
“We’re like, ‘Holy crap. We’re about to drive through that. In the dark. At night.’”
Everyone in the group made what Husain describes as “our last phone calls, just in case.”
He called his wife, who was initially hesitant about her husband volunteering in Gaza. As he recounted their conversation weeks later in a coffee shop north of Dallas, Husain’s eyes slowly filled with tears. A few fell down his face, where his cheekbones had become more pronounced after losing 13 pounds in two weeks.
On the phone at the border crossing, he tried to convey how much he loves his daughter and his wife. “I was just thinking about how I wished I was more present with my loved ones and grateful for the beautiful life I have been given,” he said.
When he hung up, one question came to mind: “Am I ready to leave this world?”
Then he boarded a vehicle bound for Khan Younis.
Husain’s group was escorted by a convoy of Israel Defense Forces, UN personnel and staff members of Rahma Worldwide as it arrived at a wall separating Israel from Gaza. Then the UN and Rahma Worldwide staffers pulled away to assist at other relief sites, leaving Husain and the other doctors surrounded by Israeli soldiers armed with assault rifles.
“You know in movies, where there’s drug deals that happen and stuff?” he said. “That’s what it looked like.”
The doctors were told if they moved they could be shot, so they tried to sit completely still while the soldiers awaited confirmation that all security clearances were in order. After about an hour and a half, the medical team was allowed to keep moving toward the hospital, and they entered Gaza surrounded by gunfire and thundering bombs — some far away, others closer.
“You’re hearing poof on your right, poof on your left. All of us were definitely scared.”
Husain, who is Muslim, began to pray.
He couldn’t make out much through the car windows, but what he saw looked like “pure rubble.” Cars destroyed. Homes turned to rocks. Everything was deserted, until they passed through the tents housing people who’ve lost their homes.
Among those tents, he knew, were his temporary coworkers.
“No one has homes anymore,” he said. “So even in the hospital, all the doctors, the nurses, the techs, and along with the civilians, the normal civilians, everyone lives in tents. The director of the hospital has broken slippers and lives in a tent.”
They reached Nasser Hospital after almost 16 hours of travel from Jordan, and the next day they got to work.
‘God Helped Us Save a Lot of People’
In the coffee shop in Dallas, Husain pulled out his phone, opened his photo library, and scrolled through images of his patients.
Every single photo had a story.
One boy, a 9-year-old wearing a black athletic shirt and gray sweatpants, was shot in the head, the neck, and the abdomen. There’s a word for this: “polytrauma.” In Dallas, Husain has seen plenty of gunshot wounds. But not like this. Not so many, all at the same time.
When the boy arrived at Nasser, Husain said he had to act fast. The child’s heart rate was plummeting, and he was bleeding out from the pelvis. Meanwhile, there were dozens of other bodies lying on the floor, some dead, others in desperate need of emergency care. Husain and the other doctors often had to decide in a matter of seconds if and how they could save a patient.
“It still haunts me,” Husain said. “I feel regret, almost like we gave up on him. But I made the decision to push ketamine to give him a peaceful death. And he’s a 9-year-old boy. In what world is that natural? What world is it natural to just let kids die and be shot at the food aid distribution site, trying to get food?”
According to the UN, 875 Gazans have died trying to access food in recent weeks. The majority of those people were killed “in the vicinity” of sites run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an organization backed by the U.S. and Israel. Recently, over 170 nonprofits and aid organizations called for the foundation to be shut down over persistent concerns that, when people arrive at the food sites, Israeli forces shoot them. Husain said he saw mostly young children at the sites trying to get food for their families.
Bloodshed is happening elsewhere in Gaza, too — Husain said another patient, a young woman who was 16 weeks pregnant, was trying to sleep in her tent when her family said a quadcopter opened fire from above. Bullets cut through their tent, he said. One entered the woman’s abdomen and her uterus.
At the hospital, using a portable ultrasound machine, Husain realized there was blood amassing in her belly. Then, with a probe, he checked the fetal heart rate and saw it dropping fast.
The woman was rushed to the operating room, where surgery saved her life. But her baby didn’t make it, and the bullet’s wreckage forced doctors to remove her uterus. She lost one child, and now she can’t have another.
On his phone, Husain showed The Barbed Wire a photo of his patient’s 16-week-old fetus. In the middle of the picture, you could make out a tiny hand.
“This is just one out of thousands and thousands, hundreds and thousands of lives,” Husain said. “We talk about the deaths, right? We say, ‘50 were killed.’ And that’s horrific. Every day, 50, 60 are killed. But we don’t talk about the thousands and hundreds of thousands of lives that have been changed forever.”
Brauner said something similar. It was difficult for him to watch patients leave the hospital, knowing that they may not survive because of an infection or a lack of nutrition. And if they do survive, their lives will likely be altered by the lack of access to any kind of rehabilitation.
“There’s this immediate death, there’s this disability, and then there’s a slow death,” Brauner said. “I have friends who have worked special operations of surgery and emergency medicine in the military and Iraq and Afghanistan. And when we compared notes, they said, ‘Well, that is just absurd. The volume and the intensity that you saw was 10 times what they saw.’”
Husain told The Barbed Wire, again and again, that he doesn’t have a political agenda. In fact, when he thinks about what he saw in Gaza, he doesn’t think about politics at all.
“What I want to convey is that this is not political,” he said. “It’s not controversial, it’s not complicated. This is a humanitarian issue at the end of the day. Anyone who has a conscience, anyone who has a soul, should understand that no one, even the worst enemy, should go through what they’re going through.”
Even after returning on June 27, he thinks about his patients constantly. Especially the children he couldn’t save. So does Rahman, who told The Barbed Wire how the experience made him both deeply sad and deeply angry.
“The first time I cried there was when I saw a school of kids, like 30, 40 kids in a circle just singing songs with their teacher,” Rahman said. “And I was like, man, this is the most beautiful thing I’ve seen.”
That memory exists alongside the “nightmare” of patients arriving in bundles like clockwork every morning, afternoon, and night.
“It was so systematic,” said Rahman. “It was precise. It was almost like they needed a hundred on their quota and they got a hundred on the quota and they need 300 injured on their quota and they got 300 injured on the quota.”
Rahman said, “I’m like, ‘How can this be an accident?’”
Dr. Nick Maynard similarly told NPR that the clustering of injuries he’s seen at Nasser Hospital is beyond coincidence. Still, the Israel Defense Forces denied intentionally harming people or firing at minors to NPR.
Many of Husain’s coworkers were young doctors or medical students, and he marvels at the fact that, on the first day he got there, the students were taking the board exams they must pass to become licensed physicians. Throughout the exams, bombs were shaking the windows around them and the ground beneath their feet.
The bombs were the endless score for Husain’s time in Gaza; they were there when he woke up and when he went to sleep. They startled him every time, especially when they got close, but the students and local doctors never flinched. They’d been used to them for a while, Husain said.
It’s still too soon to describe exactly how the experience has changed him, but he said: “My heart is definitely there.” The scale of what he witnessed is difficult to imagine: In the two weeks he was in Gaza, an open source estimate says more than 1,200 people were killed. So when Husain thinks about Gaza, which he does throughout the day, every day, he tries to focus on the success stories.
“God helped us save a lot of people,” he said, including a man shot through the face and chest at a food distribution site. The man was minutes away from bleeding out, but with help from a medical student, Husain kept enough pressure on his wounds to stave off serious arterial bleeding and roll him into surgery, just in time.
Still, despite those sources of hope, he can’t stop his mind from drifting to the stories that bring fresh tears back to his eyes.
Like the 1-year-old boy with burns on 80% of his body, and the mother Husain will never forget.
“Just imagine being burnt where your skin is just peeling off,” he said.
When the boy’s mother arrived and saw her son’s face, she collapsed and hit her head on a stretcher.
“We had to take her out, pick her up, and get her out,” Husain said. “I tried to get him to survive. I tried to resuscitate him. He wasn’t doing better.”
They declared him dead, and Husain felt compelled to record part of the conversation where the doctors delivered the news. He wanted the world to see and hear as much of his experience as possible.
In the video, reviewed by The Barbed Wire, the mother is told her son hasn’t survived, and she screams. Husain, roughly a week and a half later and 7,000 miles from that hospital room, paused the video as tears rolled down his face.
Then he continued the story.
The boy was wrapped up and taken to the morgue just outside the hospital.
Rahman saw the boy’s father, wearing a black shirt and a backwards Yankees ballcap, carrying his son in a wrapped-up heated blanket about three feet long. He took a video of the man because he wanted the world to know “this is not normal,” and he showed it to Husain, not realizing his new friend had treated the boy wrapped up in the blanket.
Later, Husain saw the mother at the morgue, surrounded by friends and family, all kneeling in prayer.
Husain knelt next to the mother and told her how sorry he was. He tried so hard to save her boy, he said, but he couldn’t.
While he was talking, the mother kept saying “Alhamdulillah,” an Arabic phrase meaning “praise be to God.” But after several moments, she stopped and turned to Husain.
She told him, “I’m going to be praying for you.”