If our leaders allow this massacre to pass without consequence or condemnation, it will reveal a disturbing truth about what the world is willing to accept

Thienminh Dinh

Heroism is no longer an abstract concept to me – it looks like Ali, who once spotted a quadcopter circling Al-Aqsa hospital in central Gaza, where he’d dropped me off less than an hour earlier. When the first airstrike slammed into the building, Ali ran: not away from danger but towards it, risking his own safety for mine. That morning, as subsequent strikes rattled the walls around us and as I phoned my sister (“Tell Mum and Dad I love them heaps – just in case”), Ali remained by my side.

Seldom in history have healthcare workers been called upon to risk their lives simply by reporting for duty.

I am not referring to people such as myself – the internationally mobile staff who fly freely in and out of crisis zones, quietly reassured that safety awaits us at the end of our assignments. We return home to security, to family and, sometimes, to applause. Occasionally we are even lauded as heroes. But “hero” is a label I reject. It does not belong to me.

It belongs to those who don’t have the option to leave: the Palestinian healthcare and humanitarian workers who have reported for duty every single day for 650 days under siege. Working alongside them has been the greatest honour of my life.

And the children we care for – they too carry their own brand of heroism.

I think of Nayla*, a 10-year-old girl who came to our field hospital after an airstrike. Her limbs were shattered – and the pressure generated from the shock wave was so immense that her stomach and small intestine had perforated. Her mother, along with her brother, had died in the same strike that left her small body riddled with holes. By then the blockade had ensured our supplies were reduced to critically low levels. Rationing the fuel to run our operating theatres, short on surgical supplies for her fractures and gastrointestinal repairs, and without the specialised nutrition needed to keep her alive, Nayla fought. She was so malnourished that her wounds refused to heal. Infection invaded her bones. The night Nayla awoke from her coma I lay awake in my tent, listening to her screams – she cried for a mother who would never come.

Then there were the young siblings, lying side by side. Their bodies had been torn apart by shrapnel and the fragments embedded so deeply that the surgeons had to dig them out, one by one…..

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jul/18/gaza-medics-healthcare-workers-heroism

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