“These women, these men are like us”

The Gaza strip is the subject of a strict blockade. What did you discover when you arrive?

A field of ruins and, in certain places, a battlefield. It’s extremely impressive. Arrived in Amman, the Jordanian capital, we cross the front line in a armored convoy of the United Nations. We hear the noise, deafening and continuous, explosions.

This area now forms a no man’s land, naked and uninhabited. We can only guess a few sides of old buildings, being leveled by bulldozers. I say to myself: “It’s Verdun.”

However, you had already come for the first time …

Yes, but my first mission had taken place just after the massacres of October 2023. There, after two years of war, everything is destroyed … When we reach Deir al-Balah, in the center of the Gaza Strip, I discover a multitude of ruined buildings and, as far as the eye can see, a tide of tents, tightened against each other.

Rare stalls survive: a bottle of one liter of petrol costs 150 euros. People carry wounded or dead, stacked on the roof of the rare cars that still circulate. Groups, weight loss, form endless tails for water …

What did your mission consistent, this time?

I especially worked in a country hospital msf, which welcomed injuries already passed by the emergency room of Nasser Hospital, the principal of the Gaza Strip, sugeded at 300 %. Our small international and Palestinian team operated from 7:30 a.m. to 8 p.m., 10 to 15 patients per day. So you have to go fast, while the injured have very complex fractures.

We often find ourselves in front of this question: can we keep the arm or the leg or should we amputate? Imagine… there are no prostheses. I remember a young girl to whom it would have been necessary to take off her arm and leg … I did not have the courage … Well, the latest news, the doctors are still discussing, but she is fine.

Under what conditions have you worked?

In Gaza, when someone is very seriously affected, he dies. There is no longer any resuscitation or full operating room. We lack everything, we use very rudimentary equipment. Aseptic conditions are both miraculous – manage to set up a hospital on what was before a field of olive trees – and very precarious: there is wind, dust, it is very hot.

And around you, the bombs fall …

Yes, in thirty years of missions, I have not seen anything equivalent. The bombings are incessant. We live with this noise permanently: fighter planes, drones, tanks, kalashnikovs, the whistling of missiles …

Who are your patients?

About 30 % of them have injuries linked to explosions, as much ball wounds, 20 % of crushing wounds – people out of rubble – and 20 % are suffering from burns. What is extremely shocking is the amount of civilians affected. The wounded that I care for are children who have left to get water, men and women looking for something to eat …

Why then have you decided to go back?

Because I deeply attached myself to the people I met there. Everything is so intense: fear, hope, suffering … very strong relationships are forged in a very short time. People realize that we still risk our life with them a little and are always very grateful.

I want to say, these women, these men, are like us. Those who decide to wage war do not want to see that the Gazanis are fathers and mothers who want to raise their children, see them grow, and live, like all of us, Europeans, Palestinians, Israelis … I am only a surgeon, but I think I can testify to their sorrow, their tears, their blood, their distress.

The suffering of the Palestinians, I had it in my hands for thirty days, twelve hours a day. Whether we are on one side or the other of this conflict, people need to see the future.

Helping them are the source of your commitment?

Yes, every year, I go about a month, on my annual leave, for doctors without borders. I put aside geopolitics aside, I place myself in the values ​​of MSF: to treat helpless people outside of any concern of race, skin color, religion, country, political regime …

Have you ever been afraid?

If, of course, claiming the opposite would be false. We constantly hear violent explosions. When one of them occurs near the hospital, we see a mass of people arriving in their arms with bodies with wide open eyes, seized by violent death.

Other times, it is a lost bullet that crosses the operating room. This time, to give me courage, I thought a lot about my big brother Denis, who died last April. I had the feeling that he was watching over me.

Are links also created with caregivers?

Of course. What marked me this time was that each of them now has the dead and the wounded in their family. If I get there (his voice trembles), I would like to tell you what happened to a nurse with whom I sympathized. On his phone, he shows me his son, a young boy aged 12-13, with big hypermetrope glasses. Its fragility is waiting for me.

Then he shows me another scene in video: an explosion, a big cloud of dust, and … and … (he stops) … The dust dissipates. I distinguish three children lying on the ground, I recognize the son of the nurse and I understand that he is dead. With a look, I felt his father’s pain. (His voice breaks again.) I have children too, it’s hard …

Have you found the team changed in two years?

Yes, considerably. All are tired, emaciated, we feel that they are at the end. Above all, I had trouble recognizing some, because they had sometimes lost 20 or 30 kg.

Food has become a treasure. One day, I overturned the contents of a coffee jar that I had brought. They looked at me, sorry, and picked up each grain, then distributed them in envelopes to share them. They do not have access to any protein: meat, milk, eggs … There is only a little rice and a few lenses.

I had brought lyophilized dishes: I started to eat them but, after three days, it seemed absurd, I distributed them around me. Once, I organized a meal with the family of little Nisma (Read his memories, below), that I had met two years ago. I gave them a lyophilized orloff calf, they were happy like kings!

Famine tires a lot and it compromises the healing of wounded wounds, mostly in advanced malnutrition.

How did you keep psychologically?

You have to be honest: there are moments where you lose foot. But there are also many others very warm with the staff, when you share the coffee, when you make a selfie all together, when you tell a few jokes to play down.

Every morning, Nisma was waiting for me to share a tea, she celebrated me, it was a ray of sunshine! I had learned that she had received bursts of shells six months ago, I was so happy to find her alive. (He is moved). It is in these moments so precious that we say that we are right to be there.

Do we really leave Gaza?

I’m still in a way. Two years ago, my departure had been terrible because we were evacuated from Nasser Hospital urgently. But this time, it was even more difficult: what to say to the team? (It stops, moved). One has the impression of abandoning people. They live day by day, without knowing if they will be there tomorrow.

Of all the missions that I have carried out for thirty years, Gaza is the one that upset me the most. Leaving the enclave, I had the feeling that the Palestinians were prisoners of endless misfortune.

We who are not surgeons, what can we do?

A public opinion that mobilizes for peace is not nothing … We are lucky in our countries to be able to influence politicians in this sense. Above all, you should never get tired of being interested in the other; never, whatever it is; And to tell, to explain to the youngest that if one day we considered peace, it is that it must be possible.