🌊 On the Ground in Gaza

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On the Ground in Gaza

One person saw the war through Israeli eyes; one through Gazan eyes. Both shared their stories with Roca.

David Hasan did not plan to enter a war zone. 

The Duke University neurosurgeon wanted to help those suffering in Gaza but thought he would do so after the war had ended. Soon, though, an opportunity arose to work in a hospital there. On December 24, he crossed into Rafah, Gaza, becoming one of the first humanitarian workers to enter the territory since October 7. 

“As soon as we entered the Palestinian side, I literally thought we were just going to hear bombing, shelling, and smoke,” Hasan told Roca. Yet there was no bombing, just the constant buzzing sound of drones circling overhead – “like music, if you will.” 

Hasan and his team – five other doctors from the US and Canada – traveled by ambulance to their hospital.

“As we were driving, we saw, I would say, maybe 40 to 50 percent of buildings either completely or partially destroyed.”

After 15 minutes, around noon, they entered the gates of the hospital compound: “We saw this ocean of people just living and walking around there,” he said, referring to displaced people living outside the hospital because they deemed it the safest place from bombing. 

“And once we got to the hospital, we were taken inside. It was shocking to see: Almost, I would say, 40-50,000 people living within the premises of the hospital.” 

The hospital had 250 beds. 

“As soon as we got there, I met the neurosurgery team…They put us in a small room with bottled water. And they told me about cases that needed to be operated. And so we went and started operating.”

Lacking water, anesthetics, pain medications, ventilators, and nearly all other modern medical equipment, the team operated on as many people as they could. Hasan said some were missing limbs, others were burned: “Really horrific, very graphic injuries.”

Then at 7 PM, the bombing started. 

“Heavy bombarding, almost within one mile of the hospital,” Hasan recalled, adding that he couldn’t sleep and would fall over because of the shocks. 

“And this continued all night until about sunrise. Then things stopped again” – and the surgeries resumed. 

On the other side of that bombardment was John Spencer, the head of urban warfare at West Point’s Modern War Institute. 

Immediately after October 7, the self-described “student of war” was in touch with contacts in Israel, where he soon found himself walking through the sites of the Hamas attack. He later embedded with the Israeli Defense Forces and went into Khan Younis, Gaza’s second-largest city. 

When asked to describe what he saw there, he had one word: “Surreal.” 

“I’ve been studying urban combat for a long time and I’ve had my own urban combat experiences, but I’ve never seen anything like the density of the urban terrain, the tunnels riddled underneath…and the rubble,” Spencer said. 

Spencer says that landscape makes it impossible to avoid civilian casualties, particularly because the Hamas tunnels – ranging from 15 to 300 feet underground – can only be destroyed with the most powerful explosives. 

Spencer – who went into the tunnels – said they are dug “only beneath civilian sites.” 

“From visiting and going into them, sometimes a tunnel was actually dug and then a school put on top of them.”

Spencer says that is why the death toll is seemingly so high. In fact, Spencer claims that Israel has taken more concrete actions “to prevent civilian harm…than any other military in the history of war.”

Yet he conceded, “I have not been able to access the other side.”

Our interview with Spencer is on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube which you can watch below.

Our interview with David is on YouTube at the link below and dropping on Spotify and Apple later today. You can subscribe on those platforms to get notified when it comes out.

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Sincerely,

Max F and Max T

RocaNews co-founders