On April 23, the Palestinian Student Union at UCLA, UMMA Volunteer Project and Palestine Children’s Relief Fund hosted a panel featuring three physicians who traveled to Gaza during the genocide: Aslam Akhtar, an emergency medicine physician; Ahmad Hussein, a vascular surgeon; and Jawad Khan, a hand surgeon. Speaking before a crowded audience of students and community members, the physicians shared firsthand accounts from hospitals operating under bombardment, famine and mass casualty conditions.
Throughout the evening, however, the speakers pushed back against being called heroes.
“We are not the heroes,” Hussein said. “The real heroes are the healthcare workers of Gaza.”
The physicians repeatedly described themselves not as saviors but as witnesses. Hussein explained that international doctors have become some of the few remaining outside witnesses able to enter Gaza as journalists and investigators continue to face restrictions and violence. Their testimonies offered students a view of Gaza far removed from statistics and headlines: overcrowded emergency rooms, children arriving with catastrophic injuries, physicians performing surgeries with minimal supplies and hospitals transformed into shelters for displaced families.
Akhtar spoke about working in Baptist Hospital in northern Gaza, one of the last functioning hospitals in the region at the time. He described waves of patients arriving after bombings and physicians being forced to ration basic necessities, including anesthesia and pain medication.
“We had to decide who would get anesthesia,” he said. “That’s something I never imagined having to do.”
One of the stories that remained with him most deeply involved a father carrying his six-year-old son into the emergency room after an explosion. While examining the child, Akhtar realized the injuries were unsurvivable.
“I swear by Allah, I am content,” the father told him after learning his son had died.
For Akhtar, the moment reflected the scale of suffering families had already endured. In overcrowded emergency rooms flooded with dozens of patients at once, even death itself became compressed by necessity. Bodies had to be moved quickly to make space for incoming victims.
Many of the physicians’ patients were children.
Khan recalled treating an eight-year-old girl who had been shot while playing outside with her sisters. One sister was killed, while the surviving children suffered devastating injuries requiring amputations and emergency surgeries.
“You stabilize and move on,” Khan said, describing the realities of practicing medicine with limited resources and endless incoming trauma.
As a vascular surgeon, Hussein described seeing severe arterial injuries and limb trauma on a near-daily basis. He spoke about the long-term consequences of disabling injuries, especially among children and young people.
“There’s not enough discussion about the immense amount of disability and injured people,” he said. Hussein described what he viewed as “a targeted campaign to disable the next generation.”
Despite the destruction around them, all three physicians repeatedly returned to the same point: the resilience and skill of Gaza’s healthcare workers.
With many senior physicians killed, detained or displaced, hospitals were often being run by medical students and residents. Medical schools had been destroyed, salaries had disappeared and healthcare workers themselves were surviving under famine conditions. Still, they continued showing up each day.
“The doctors there are smarter than most attendings in the United States,” Hussein said. “They do so much with so little.”
Akhtar echoed the sentiment, describing physicians who had mastered alternative treatments and procedures simply because standard supplies no longer existed. He recalled colleagues surviving on almost no food while continuing to work around the clock treating patients.
The physicians also emphasized that hospitals had become more than medical centers. Families displaced by repeated evacuation orders were living in hospital courtyards, hallways and waiting rooms because they believed hospitals might offer some degree of safety.
For international doctors, their presence sometimes served another purpose.
“When an American doctor is there,” Khan said, “people feel a little safer.”
Still, uncertainty followed them everywhere. The physicians described sleeping through nearby explosions, hearing buildings shake from airstrikes and navigating constantly shifting evacuation zones. Hussein recalled moments when even the international medical teams themselves became displaced as bombardments intensified around them.
Amid the devastation, however, the speakers also shared moments of humanity that remained with them long after returning home.
Khan spoke about handing out stickers to children in the hospital and watching them smile despite everything surrounding them. Akhtar recalled a Gazan physician risking his safety to retrieve a small pomegranate from his abandoned home as a gift for a guest.
“These are people who had almost nothing,” Akhtar said, “and they still wanted to serve others.”
Faith also remained central throughout the panel. The physicians described healthcare workers pausing for prayer between surgeries and repeatedly expressing patience despite overwhelming loss.
By the end of the discussion, the speakers returned once more to the idea of witnessing. The people they met, they explained, did not ask for pity. They asked for their stories to be remembered and shared.
“Just tell them our story,” Akhtar recalled hearing repeatedly. “We want to live.”