As the world marked the end of 2023 and the beginning of a new year, Israel’s ground and air war in Gaza entered its 13th week since the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack that killed 1,200 Israeli men, women and children. Gaza’s health ministry reports that since the start of the war, more than 22,000 Palestinians have been killed, with about 70 percent of those women and children. Over 57,000 Palestinians have reportedly been injured with little or no medical care available.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) says that over 85 percent of Gaza’s population have been displaced, some multiple times. Families are forced to move repeatedly in search of safety—with food, clean water and medical supplies scarce or inaccessible. At least 142 members of UNRWA’s staff and 69 journalists have been killed in the conflict thus far.
Despite growing international calls for a ceasefire, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says his military continues to pursue the destruction of Hamas, asserting that the war will continue for “many more months.” Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Dr. Dana Elborno, an OB/GYN, pediatric and adolescent physician practicing in Illinois. Here Dr. Elborno, a Palestinian American, with many family members now living in Gaza, talks about the horror 2.3 million residents there face daily in Israel’s unrelenting, brutal war.
DR. DANA ELBORNO: This is not the story that we wish to be telling about ourselves. We’re a proud people. We’re a dignified people. Before all of this started, they had homes, they had jobs, they had families that they were raising and kids that were aspiring to also achieve high levels of education and had a lot of dreams for themselves.
I do not wish to be talking about the undignified circumstances that my family is living in. I do not wish to be talking about them starving or living in crowded facilities where they’re sick, where they’re hungry, where they have one bathroom for upwards of 700 people, where they have no access or reliable access to water.
These are not things that we talk about easily. We talk about them because we’re hoping to effect change, not because we’re asking for a handout.
We are talking about them because this is expressly the result of American-funded Israeli policies and things that are out of our hands. These are conditions that have been forced on us, not something that is related to decisions that we made or any agency that we had. It’s very difficult to share these stories when you’re talking about your own family.
The things that I’m talking about or will say, they’re happening to my family, but they’re happening to all Palestinians in Gaza. So this is just a lens or an insight into a circumstance of what everyday people are facing and not as some sort of an exceptional tale of the way that this has affected me uniquely.
The scale right now is that the 2 million Palestinians who live in Gaza and many of them are refugees. The majority are refugees who were forcibly displaced in the late 1940s when Israel was arbitrarily created on top of Palestinian land as a Jewish-only state, where the majority of the people who live there on those lands are not Jewish.
So to create a Jewish majority there, a lot of innocent Palestinians were killed and forcibly displaced in what was known as the Nakba of ’48. And what we’re seeing today is an ongoing and a continuation of the Nakba with the killing of innocent civilians and those in forcible displacement.
You just recounted the number of deaths that we’ve seen of Palestinians in Gaza in the past couple of months. On top of that, we have tens of thousands of Palestinians who are wounded, and we know that half of those victims are children. We also know that 70,000 women in Gaza right now are pregnant. We know that 7,000 of them are due to deliver sometime in the next month, about 200 each day. We know that Israel’s assault on Gaza has not only attacked residential facilities, as you’ve described, causing the forcible displacement of the majority of Palestinians, but it has also attacked the water desalination plants, the sewage system, the bakeries, the schools, the universities, the health care system.
In short, it has affected every aspect of Palestinian life, leaving 2 million people to ask the question, “Where should we go? Where is it safe to stand?” There is not one millimeter of Gaza that is safe to stand. And my father-in-law tells me if there was one millimeter that was safe to stand in, it would be stacked with 2 million people high.
Every time they have been told that they are being displaced for safety, they have been bombarded in the exact places that they have been told to flee. So on top of bombardment, they are also homeless. And that is a circumstance that is affecting millions of Palestinians in Gaza. They are being forced into overcrowded conditions without any sanitation capabilities, without any food or water to adequately supply the millions of people who have been displaced.
And it’s leaving people really feeling ultimately forgotten. They are trapped. A civilian population that is being bombarded and starved and there is no way out. So the scale of this catastrophe, in short, it is beyond imagination and beyond description.
Read Dr. Dana Elborno’s article titled, “US Palestinians Feel Helpless as Our Tax Dollars Fund Our Families’ Destruction.”
Listen to Scott Harris’ in-depth interview with Dr. Dana Elborno (20:26) and see more articles and opinion pieces in the Related Links section of this page.
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