I urge you to set aside 20 minutes and watch this video testimony by Dr. Tanya Haj Hassan, a pediatric intensive care doctor with Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP). She shared a harrowing account of her experiences working in Gaza, where she bore witness to the devastating humanitarian crisis. She described the systematic targeting of civilians, healthcare workers, and infrastructure, emphasizing the unimaginable toll on Palestinian lives. Through poignant stories of patients and colleagues, she highlighted the loss of entire families, the suffering of children, and the resilience of healthcare workers who continue to serve despite constant threats and personal losses. Dr. Haj Hassan detailed how hospitals have become targets of military strikes and described the horrors of forced displacement, deprivation, and the relentless psychological and physical toll on Gaza’s population. She called for urgent global action, stating that silence in the face of such atrocities perpetuates impunity and signals the erosion of humanitarian law. Dr. Haj Hassan urged the international community to move beyond pity and praise, offering meaningful solidarity and tangible support for Palestinians. Citing the courage of healthcare workers in Gaza as an inspiring model, she asked the audience to reflect on their responsibility to act and to consider what they are willing to risk to prevent further atrocities. (Source: UN Palestinian Rights Committee)

Here’s a transcript I produced with the assistance of TurboScribe.

So as his excellency mentioned, I’m a pediatric intensive care doctor and have worked in Gaza many times over the past decade, most recently as part of an emergency medical team working in a hospital in Gaza’s middle area during the ongoing genocide. I’m here today in the moral company of every other health professional that I know who has worked in Gaza over the last 14 months, some of whom are with me here today in this room. We’re here in solidarity with our Palestinian healthcare workers and with the Palestinian people.

You cannot witness what is happening in Gaza and not emerge enraged and determined to stop it. We don’t want to be here or on the news repeatedly providing moral witness to ongoing atrocities, but by design international journalists and independent human rights and forensic investigators have been prohibited by Israel from bearing witness. At the same time, incredible Palestinian journalists covering the genocide of their own people have been repeatedly targeted by Israel and discredited while both the reporting and their murders have been largely ignored by mainstream Western media.

As one of the few international observers allowed into Gaza, I can tell you spend just five 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 human 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 of 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 it’s 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 the 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 can’t stop genocide. This is why it’s called the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and this is why I as a doctor am here today pleading to you.

Before I share what I bore witness to, I want to share a quote from my colleague Dr. Mohammad Ghanem, a young ER doctor who was killed one month ago by a quadcopter drone after steadfastly caring for his patients for over 400 days while the hospitals in which he was working were repeatedly besieged. Dr. Ghanem said, as much as I could I stay away from sharing the tragic stories for two reasons. The first reason is that I know it is of no use for those who couldn’t be moved by pictures of dismembered and charred corpses will not be moved by some words and the second reason is that I can’t find the words to describe the stories.

I share Dr. Ghanem’s sentiment. What is left to say that might move people to action? What is left? How can we even begin to articulate what we have seen? I remember the silence of the woman brought into the hospital injured, staring blankly and unable to speak. She had given birth one week earlier.

She couldn’t find her seven-day-old baby. Both her baby and her toddler were trapped under the rubble. There are no words that can adequately convey the pain and depravity of this aggression.

There are no words. I remember six-year-old Siwar who was intubated in ICU with severe traumatic brain injury. Her little brother still missing.

I recall her mother sitting next to her, tears streaming down her face, asking what was her crime. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that Siwar, with her beautiful, long, dark lashes and curls, would likely never talk or interact fully if she were to survive. Or five-year-old Mohammed with an in-and-out penetrating injury to the head, likely a conjoint.

Sorry. Sorry, I have a nosebleed. I don’t know if someone can grab me a tissue.

It would be really helpful. But I’ll continue, as our Palestinian colleagues have for over 400 days. Or five-year-old Mohammed with an in-and-out penetrating injury to the head, likely a gunshot, who died in the ER as there were no beds in the ICU.

He had no known surviving, thank you, he had no known surviving family to retrieve his body and was taken to the morgue by the medical team. I remember Mohammed so well. His hands and feet were really small.

The last expression on his face was one of pain. Or the elderly woman, whose age I did not learn, shot multiple times by the Israeli military while she was on the beach. She died while her elderly husband held her hand, tearfully telling me, we only have God.

Or 13-year-old Amir, who sustained severe neck trauma after his home was bombed and kept calling for his sister. He didn’t recognize that she was the girl in the bed next to him, because she had been burned beyond recognition. When she died, Mohammed was left as the only surviving member of his family.

I recall his vacant stare and his soft voice whispering into my ear, I wish I had died with them. Everyone I love is in heaven. I don’t want to be here anymore.

How do you find the words to describe Amir’s story? Or toddler cousins, Mohammed and Masa, who we resuscitated on the same bed after their residential building was bombed. I recall undoing their diapers, desperately looking for blood vessels to give them intravenous fluids. Mohammed’s bled to death.

Masa suffered severe brain injury. She was still in a coma when I left Gaza. Both her parents were injured in the same attack.

I don’t know if they survived. Or Shorouq, 15-year-old girl with head and chest injuries, whose eyes were severely burned. She kept calling for her mother, who she couldn’t see was right next to her and also severely injured.

Her mother gasped desperately for air until she died. We, the medical team, knew before Shorouq did that she was the only surviving member of her family. Shorouq, whose name means sunrise.

How do you even begin to find words to tell these stories? Or the father, frantically searching for his children in the ER, who found us resuscitating them on the floor. All of his children except Abdullah, who he never found. Or the lovely older gentleman who helped carry the injured into the emergency department, comforting them in any way he could, cleaning the pools of blood after every mass casualty.

I saw him daily and had assumed he was a hospital employee, only to later learn that he had started volunteering at the hospital after his entire family had been killed at the beginning of the genocide. He had found that the only way he could cope with having survived was by helping other families. How does one begin to find words to describe his story? These are not exceptional stories.

Every single person I met in Gaza has lost family, has lost friends, colleagues, neighbors, violently taken from them. I speak of the patients with traumatic injuries who I cared for in just 14 days. But this is only one dimension of this apocalyptic situation.

Everything needed to sustain life is under attack in Gaza and has been for some time. Water, food, shelter, education, health care, energy, sewage, sanitation. A child who was living in an apartment and going to school in Gaza 14 months ago, if alive today, is now attempting to survive Israeli airstrikes, warships, gunfire, hunger, starvation, a lack of clean water, the spread of diseases that threaten their little immunocompromised bodies.

No safe shelter and no prospects for education today or in the future. Every university in Gaza has been destroyed. The only two medical schools in Gaza where I used to teach have been destroyed.

Every child in Gaza is living this horror. I constantly think of these children, children that I personally met, and I hope they are alive, surrounded by parents who are also still alive. That they’re not maimed, not hungry, not thirsty, not sick, not cold as the winter encroaches on their tents, and not scared.

At the same time, I know that that’s an impossible reality for any child in Gaza today. On the eve of World Children’s Day last week, the United States vetoed for the fifth time a UN Security Council calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. In the words of a Palestinian ambassador to the UN, Majid Bamiya, there is no justification for vetoing a resolution trying to stop atrocities.

There is no justification. I want you to take a second and imagine all of the children that I just spoke about, their mothers, their fathers, desperately seeking medical care and searching for hope in one of the few remaining hospitals in Gaza. Then the electricity cuts out, the entrance to the hospital is struck by a missile, the hospital is threatened with forced displacement orders again.

It’s apocalyptic. That same hospital where I witnessed each of those horrific tragedies has been targeted multiple times over the past 14 months, as has virtually every single hospital in Gaza. Hospitals and healthcare workers have been systematically targeted by the Israeli military from the very first day.

Our colleagues and friends have been killed, maimed, unlawfully detained, and tortured. I have personally met healthcare workers who describe physical, psychological, and sexual torture by Israeli military and Israeli prison guards. One of my most dedicated nursing colleagues, Saeed, had been abducted while evacuating from al-Shifa Hospital after an Israeli forced displacement order.

He was detained for 53 days and described the most horrific forms of torture. After his release, he suffered from severe insomnia and yet he attended the ER every single day to care for his patients. He fell asleep one day holding the small body of a fatally injured infant who had died during an attempted resuscitation from exhaustion.

Dr. Ghanim, who I quoted before, wrote in April, six months before he was killed, I quote, al-Shifa Hospital was under siege while I was inside it three times and I was forcefully removed from it twice. This time it was the most severe, both in terms of the siege, the incursion, and the amount of destruction. We were 13 doctors in the emergency department.

All of us were tortured to different degrees and six doctors were injured or arrested. I am only talking about the department I was in charge of. I am not talking about the doctors who were executed directly from other apartments after they were arrested or the doctors whose fate is still unknown.

End quote. Over 1,000 healthcare workers have been killed in Gaza. Hundreds of healthcare workers have been held in Israeli captivity.

At least four have been killed while in detention. Their bodies are still being held. Every single health care worker I met in Gaza has lost family, has lost friends, has lost colleagues.

Every single healthcare worker I met has been displaced multiple times, has been forced out of the hospitals where they work. Many healthcare workers have been killed while trying to rescue the wounded in what has infamously been called Israel’s double or triple strike attacks, where a location is struck and then shortly after, it is struck a second and third time once the rescue workers are there to retrieve the casualties. Other healthcare workers have been killed while working in hospitals.

Hospitals and healthcare workers represent life and the will to keep people alive. The systematic and egregious targeting of health care is a line that should have never been crossed, like so, so many red lines. What happens now that all of these lines have been crossed? What sort of world have we descended into? It’s actually a world we’ve allowed to persist and build up to for decades.

These profound injustices did not start 14 months ago. Palestinians have attempted every single means, including diplomacy and peaceful protest, and appealing to the very reason this establishment was created. Their efforts have been met with the complete disregard of UN resolutions and the deepening violation of their human rights.

I remember one Friday in 2019 at Al-Shifa Hospital during the Great March of Return, the peaceful process that lasted for two years at the border wall, which killed about 223 Palestinians. 223 Palestinians were shot and killed by Israeli forces during those protests. Al-Shifa Hospital is the same hospital that has now been almost entirely destroyed, where doctors have dug mass graves to bury the dead, where the brilliant doctor Adnan al-Bursh led the orthopedic department before he was abducted, tortured, and likely raped to death.

I vividly recall one day in 2019 in that hospital, an adolescent boy who was just brought in from the protest after being shot in the neck by Israeli soldiers from one of the towers. He was awake but gagging on his breathing tube and unable to move any of his body below his neck. His spinal cord had been severed by the bullet.

He would never be able to move his arms, his legs, or likely even breathe on his own. His father pleaded with the medical team and kept asking, what did we do other than peacefully demand for our rights? In the words of our dear friend, Dr. Khamis al-Assi, a pain and rehabilitation doctor who to this day is besieged in Gaza, he said, we have been abandoned. We’ve been sacrificed for the cause we wanted to protect for everyone, but we are the only people who are paying that price, unfortunately.

By everyone, Dr. Khamis means each and every one of us here together in this room and the world over. Knowing I would be here today, I asked some colleagues in Gaza if they had messages they wanted me to share with you today. I’d like to share some of them.

Tell them we are tired, we are without homes, on the streets, our loved ones are gone, and we are all stories. This was a message from a young ER nurse. She’s still trapped.

An intensive care doctor besieged in Gaza and separated from his family told me, tell them everything you came and saw with your eyes. Tell them that I want to see my son and my wife, because I really miss them. Saeed, the nurse I spoke to earlier who was detained and tortured, says to you, we are being buried.

Every minute we are being buried. Every minute we disappear. Every minute we’re abducted.

We’re experiencing things that the mind cannot even comprehend. We die and don’t find anyone to bury us. I’m asking you to share my story, my whole story, with my name.

I want the whole world to know that I’m a human being. Sorry, this has gone on for too long. I want the whole world to know that I’m a human being.

At the end, I’m not pen on paper. I’m not anonymous. I’m a human being created by God.

He then asks the question that I’m going to pose to you. 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 neighbor? Why not my colleague? Our Palestinian colleagues are not here today because the systems we currently exist in don’t recognize the value of Palestinian life. I’m going to end by some reflections from myself and my colleagues who recently came back from Gaza.

I’m speaking to you today both as a member of civil society and as a healthcare worker who has witnessed firsthand the death and destruction inflicted upon the Palestinian people. We spent the last 14 months watching as the most live-streamed and documented genocide in history has been met with silence, widespread propaganda campaigns justifying the unjustified silencing and discrediting those who have attempted to expose it. The eyewitnesses that have made it out alive consistently reported crimes that in any other context would have led to sanctions.

But here, after 14 months of the most grave breaches of humanitarian law, gross violations of human rights, barbaric war crimes, it is met with impotence by individuals, countries, and the very institution represented by this building. One day someone will dig up the records of our testimonies, pleading for 14 months. They will dig up the records of Palestinians covering their own genocide when international journalists were unprecedentedly banned from entering.

Palestinian children setting up press conferences to tell the world that their lives mattered. We will have to reckon with that history. The precedent that’s been set in Gaza, as some of my colleagues here had mentioned earlier, it’s going to spread everywhere throughout the world.

It signals the demise of rule of law. We’ve already seen it spread to Lebanon. And as one volunteer surgeon said, when I was in Gaza, I felt like it was a prelude to the end of humanity.

If solidarity with your fellow humans is not enough of a reason to act, think about how this is going to spill over. This should be frightening for everyone. I recognize that the words I shared with you today are heavy.

These words pale in comparison to the reality experienced by Palestinians for over 400 days and 76 years before that. Palestinians don’t need our pity. They don’t need our praise.

They need our meaningful and truthful solidarity. And there is no time for despair. In the 24 hours that I’m going to spend in this city, at least 60 children in Gaza will be injured or killed.

I recognize that many of you here, by virtue of being here today, are already convinced of the need to act. It takes courage to fight a corrupted system, a system that gives disproportionate to countries with terrible records of global violence. Today, as all of us sit here in the comfort of safety, Dr. Hossam Abu Safi is in Kamal Adwan Hospital, just discharged from the intensive care unit after he was injured by an Israeli strike.

His son was killed not long ago. His two daughters are injured. And yet he continues steadfastly to provide care for his patients.

He said a few days ago, we will continue to provide this service at any cost to ourselves. The courage and action by Palestinian healthcare workers in the face of this genocide presents an exemplary model for all of us. The question I want to last leave you with is, what are we risking? Thank you.