Six doctors protested at the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday, drawing attention to the escalating public health crisis in Gaza caused by Israel’s ongoing military onslaught, which has killed at least 40,000 people, including 16,000 children. The war began after a Hamas-led attack on Israel October 7, 2023, that killed around 1,200 people, including many civilians and children.
The gathered medical professionals met on the fourth floor of the McCormick Place Convention Center and described their experiences in occupied Gaza, hoping to bring attention to the suffering and collapse of medical infrastructure. According to reporting from The Nation, pediatric intensive care doctor Tanya Haj-Hassan said she held the hands of dying children “taking their last, final gasps with no family alive able to comfort them.” Internal medicine and pediatrics doctor Ahmad Yousaf described a pregnant woman with severe burns all over her body who they knew “was going to die there and her baby would die there, and there was nothing we could do.”
Thaer Ahmad, a Palestinian-American emergency medicine doctor who recently worked at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, said that “there is no music that you can play on the main stage during this convention that’s going to make us forget the sounds and the tears of all of the children that we saw laid on the hospital floors.”
This is not the first time doctors have drawn attention to the crisis in Gaza from a public health perspective. Speaking to Al Jazeera last month, Haj-Hassan raised awareness about the presence of polio virus in Gaza wastewater.
“Normally if you have a case of polio, you’re going to isolate them, you’re going to make sure that they use a bathroom that nobody else uses, make sure that they’re not in close proximity to other people, [but] that’s impossible” as the region struggles under a military assault, Taj-Hassan said, adding that “you have everybody clustering in refugee camps at the moment without vaccines for at least the past nine months, including children who would otherwise have been vaccinated for polio and adults who, in the setting of an outbreak, should receive a booster, including healthcare workers.”
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