A message from the rubble: Gazans are more than numbers in news reports, we are human beings
A testimony from a Palestinian psychologist working for Médecins Sans Frontières.
This testimony has been shared anonymously by a Palestinian psychologist working with Médecins Sans Frontières in Gaza. All names have been changed to protect the subject’s identities.
I was once a young man who knew who he was: I knew my age, my dreams, and my ambitions. I was a psychologist and a theatre actor. I smiled at life and was building my future. I built my apartment above my family's home, brick by brick, to start a new life with a future wife. I wanted to live like the rest of the world – with hope and dignity.
Then the war came.
On 7 October 2023, my world was turned upside down. My dreams were reduced to rubble and my childhood memories to dust under the debris. I stayed in my home for days, watching the planes launch their massive, devastating missiles – missiles that shook the heart before they shook the earth. I lived through a terror that steals sleep from your eyes and an anxiety that never ends.
I was finally forced to flee, leaving everything behind. I left my father, a stubborn Palestinian man clinging to his land, and I took my sick mother, my sisters, my brother's wife, and her infant child. For fifty-seven days, we diced with death until we reached Rafah, where a new kind of suffering began.
Amid the war, I tried to be strong. I tried to help. I volunteered in shelters to provide psychological support to children, to put a smile on their faces, to feel a moment of peace in the storm. But the suffering followed us wherever we went.
Then we discovered the cancer had returned to my mother's liver. After countless pleas, she travelled to Egypt for treatment, and my family was torn apart: my mother and sister in Egypt, my father and brothers in the north, and me in the south with another part of the family. I suddenly became a "father" to a baby girl born into the war, responsible for a family in a miserable tent, running from bombs one moment and facing starvation the next.
Prices skyrocketed, cash disappeared, until I was ’buying money with money’. In June 2024, my mother passed away in Egypt, away from us, alone except for my sister. She couldn't see us, and we couldn't say goodbye.
The pain did not stop. In December 2024, my brother, Mohammed*, in the north was seriously injured in a missile strike that left him with severe injuries to his shoulder and neck. He sought refuge at Kamal Adwan Hospital, he believed the hospital was a place of healing, a safe haven, but he was wrong.
Instead of treatment, Mohammed found torment. Israeli soldiers stormed the hospital and arrested him at his weakest point. Despite his obvious wounds and needing a crutch to walk, they showed him no mercy. Their first act of cruelty was to snap his crutch in half.
They beat him savagely, their blows landing on his already injured body. He was then transferred to Sde Teiman prison, a place where humanity goes to die.
There, the psychological torture began. A jailer—an Israeli soldier—showed him pictures of our family home, which had been bombed by an Israeli pilot. "We blew it up," the jailer told Mohammed coldly. Then he produced a picture of us. "This is your brother, this is your sister, this is your wife. This is your daughter. We killed them all. Your entire family is dead," the soldier lied.
They deprived him of medical care, leaving his wounds to fester and his pain to consume him.
On one occasion, a guard pushed a plate of food through the small opening in the door. As Mohammed, handcuffed, reached out to take it, the soldier pounced and stomped on his hands with brutal force. The damage to his nerves was catastrophic. The hand that hadn't been injured in the bombing was now swollen with a severe infection, and the prison doctors threatened to amputate it because it had become gangrenous.
A female soldier of Russian origin would mock him, saying in broken Arabic, " Mohammed, stand up straight." And when he couldn't, because of his injuries and pain, she would threaten him with sexual violence and rape.
In the darkness of his cell, his solace was visions of his child and our deceased mother, who would visit him in his dreams, comforting his tormented soul.
When I went to receive him after he was finally released in a prisoner exchange, the first thing he did was grab me and ask through flowing tears, "Are you alive? Is my child alive? Is my wife okay?" For months, he had lived believing we were all dead. He cried in my arms like a small child, completely broken.
Today, Mohammed is free from the prison walls but remains a prisoner in his body and mind. He suffers from severe sleep disorders, nerve damage, and a neck injury that never healed. He urgently needs medical treatment abroad, treatment that is unavailable in Gaza's devastated hospitals. We are waiting, hoping for his evacuation, for a chance to heal.
But how do you heal a soul that was deliberately crushed? How do you rebuild a man who was systematically broken?
This is not just a story of war. This is a story of a deliberate attempt to erase a human being. I share it with you, not for sympathy, but as a testimony. You must know what is happening in the shadows, in the prisons, in the name of security.
Today, I am in Deir al-Balah. My new home is a tent, and my family is scattered. My heart is with them but I fear for them with the bombing, and from the famine that is consuming us. There are days I find no food, surviving on one meal a day.
World Leaders,
This is not a passing story. This is my life, and the life of thousands like me in Gaza. We are not numbers in news reports. We are human beings with dreams, feelings, and dignity. We breathe fear and live with death every day.
I call on you: do not let your humanity be buried under the rubble. Do not be silent in the face of this injustice. Stop this war. Lift this siege. Save the lives that are being lost every single day.
This is not just an emotional message – it is a cry from the heart, from the rubble, from a displacement tent, and from the depths of suffering.
Please save Gaza. Please save humanity.
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Still Warm with Dreams (a poem in response)
Don’t look away.
A heartbeat,
warm with dreams,
buried in rubble.
Not numbers, people.
A crayon.
A shoe.
A name in ash.
We cry from under rubble.
Has your heart gone cold?
Your silence fall louder than the bombs.
(in witness)
Thankyou for this article. This is just one heartbreaking story of one family. There are so many more we will never know. I hope you continue to raise their voices 🙏