Physician describes working at Gaza hospital amid war
Emergency and family physician Dr. Sarah Lalonde is a member of the Church of St. Mark and St. Peter in Montreal. For the last decade, she has mainly worked in rural and remote areas, including Northern Canada in Innu, Inuit and Cree communities. She has also worked internationally in “low-resource” hospitals and clinics and serves as a Quebec physician expert on human trafficking, training health-care professionals to identify patients in health-care settings who are being trafficked.
From Jan. 29 to Feb. 27, Lalonde provided medical care at the European Gaza Hospital, a trauma centre located in the southern town of Al-Fukhari near the Egyptian border. During this time she treated many Palestinian patients affected by Israel’s ongoing attack on Gaza. Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, has said a genocide is underway in Gaza, which the Israeli government and some Jewish groups such as the American Jewish Committee have denied.
The Anglican Journal spoke to Lalonde about her experience as a doctor in Gaza. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How did you end up doing four weeks of medical work in Gaza?
When I was a medical student, I had many friends who were Jewish. They talked to me about Israel, and I began getting a little curious about the country. In 2015, after I finished all my studies, I decided that I would visit.
At that time, I spent some time in Jerusalem and I heard about this tour called the Dual Narrative Tour, where you go to Hebron. Hebron, as you remember from the Bible, is a city where Abraham buried his wife Sarah. We were invited to go to the city, and we were going to spend half the day with a settler and half the day with a Palestinian who lives in that city. When I went to go visit there were about 700 settlers, about 200,000 Palestinians, and about 3,000 soldiers to guard the settlers.
In that context, I went into the Palestinian side of Hebron, and I went to visit the mosque. As I was leaving the mosque, I noticed that the border police were angry at the checkpoint. I saw that one of the other people involved in the tour was hiding, so I decided to hide with him. As I hid with that person, I heard some shooting at the checkpoint. What had actually happened was that the Israeli border police killed a 17-year-old girl, and I was there hiding around the corner.
After that experience, I started to understand the type of fear that someone might have when they’re living under occupation. I started learning more about the history of Palestine and Israel, and that’s when my desire to go to Gaza began. Then I started following some other people doing similar work.
I went to Gaza this year [with an organization] called Glia. The founder of that organisation, Dr. Tarek Loubani, is a physician in Ontario, and he’s been to Gaza probably more than 50 times. He was doing a lot of different work, and he attended the Great March of Return [a series of Palestinian demonstrations near the Gaza-Israel border between March 2018 and December 2019] where he was shot. So I was following all this news about Gaza, about Palestine and about Israel since about 2015. That’s where that desire came out of.
What were conditions like at the European Gaza Hospital for patients and staff?
We wouldn’t be able to talk about the conditions without talking about all the supply issues that they have at the hospital. Right now the crossings are closed, so there’s no more stuff coming in. There was already a shortage of equipment and instruments and medicine when I was there. The crossing being closed also means we can’t medically evacuate patients. There are lots of patients who need urgent treatment and they can’t leave.
There’s a lot of challenges with supplies. We’re using all kinds of makeshift solutions to compensate for the things that we’re missing. We’re reusing disposable equipment. Our CT scanner’s in disrepair and has a black spot that it puts on every CT. Our MRI machine’s not working. Our ultrasound machines are limited and very old. We’re missing some medication. For example, in the ER, we had no oral analgesia and we’re lacking anaesthesia as well.
We also have some issues with things like paper for the heart monitor. It’s difficult for us to monitor our patients because we’re missing some items. For example, the blood pressure cuffs are very old, so they don’t read that well. Or we have the oxygen meter that goes on the finger, but we don’t have the one for the ear or the forehead. That means that when the patient is very, very sick and they don’t have as much blood flow to their finger, we are unable to measure their oxygen or their pulse rate.
The other part of your question has to do with the staff and their ability to work. Most of my colleagues are living in tents, or they’re living in a structure that doesn’t have four walls. They’re living without electricity or access to running water. They’ve experienced great financial loss. They’ve lost loved ones. They’ve been displaced many, many, many times. It’s difficult for them to protect their families.
As health-care professionals, we’re humans where we have a limited ability to detach, to be able to perform at work. If at night you’re sleeping in a tent and there’s a rainstorm and you’re up all night fixing your tent, it’s going to be harder for you to perform. If at night you’re listening to really loud drones and your baby’s crying because the baby’s hungry, it’s going to be harder to really focus and to be able to perform well.
My colleagues are experiencing the genocide in two aspects at the same time. They’re experiencing the genocide in a professional context. They go to work, they see these mass casualty events. They’re trying to work in a low-resource setting, saving as many people as possible. We have to keep in mind that [patients are] their people. These are people from their community that are being targeted. And they’re also experiencing it after the shift ends, in all the ways that I was talking about.
Despite all those things, they’re doing amazing work. They’re coming to work, they’re making jokes, they’re treating patients. They treated me with extraordinary kindness, and they welcomed me and shared their food with me and gave great care to patients. One of the patients’ families told me that the health-care workers in Gaza are their heroes.
What kind of patients did you see?
We saw patients who were coming to the hospital because of mental health challenges like stress. We saw people who were coming to the hospital because of untreated medical conditions. For example, they had had high blood pressure for a long time. They had a complication like a stroke or bleeding in their brain. We saw people who had issues related to hygiene, like skin infections or gastrointestinal diseases.
We saw people who were shot by snipers, who were targeted by quadcopters, who had injuries related to unexploded ordinances that they found, people who were targeted by missiles. It’s important to note that the people that we saw shot by snipers, it was clear that they were shot in a manner that they showed no threat to the person who shot them—like they were shot as they were running away. We also received prisoners or hostages who had been taken by Israel and we treated them.
What were the demographics of the patients you treated?
The vast majority of people that we saw shot by snipers, for example, were children. One of the stories that really stuck with me was there were a bunch of teenagers, six of them. They were approached by the Israeli military and the Israeli military asked them to remove their pants and put their T-shirts over their heads. That’s what happened to those six children, who were male. They told them to run, so they ran. Three of them ran away. Three of them were shot. Two died and came to our hospital, and a third one was injured and came to our hospital. We treated that child for his wounds.
Israel has consistently bombed and attacked hospitals. Did you experience any attacks on the European Gaza Hospital during the time that you were working there?
The hospital was attacked last year. It was taken over by the military for about a month, and the hospital was emptied out at that time of health-care professionals and patients. All the perimeter around the hospital was bombed, and I could see all the remnants of that bombing from my bedroom window. I lived on the hospital campus while I was there.
There’s been a lot of attacks on health care for many years. It’s been well-documented by human rights organizations. But since October 2023, there’ve been a lot of attacks on health care in the form of staffing. More than 1,000 health-care workers have been killed. [Note: The United Nations said that as of Jan. 2, more than 1,057 Palestinian health and medical professionals had been killed.] Many have been kidnapped and have been tortured. Some of the people who worked at my hospital were victims of being kidnapped and tortured. That also affects, of course, the amount of people that can come work at the hospital.
During some of the most difficult months of the genocide, there was one emergency physician there alone with medical students. He told me that he intubated 70 patients in one day. He was totally alone living in the hospital, taking care of all the patients with the help of some medical students.
How did your time working as a doctor in Gaza affect you?
I’ve been profoundly changed by learning about Palestine and being in Palestine. That change started in 2015 when I first visited. Definitely working at the hospital in Gaza, it was difficult to witness those war crimes every day.
I remember on one particular day, we received a preschool-aged child who had been shot by a sniper. I remember how scared that child was and how she was calling out for her parents and how scared the parents were. I also remember how much compassion her parents had for her and how attentive they were to what she needed. I remember her dad being in the hall and she was crying out for him, “Baba, Baba” [“Father” or “Dad” in Arabic]. I was trying to talk to him, and he said, “I’ve got to go see her right away.” It impacted me to see those war crimes.
I learned a lot from being there. We talk a lot in more activist Christian circles about that passage in Matthew 25 when it’s the end of the age and they’re separating the sheep from the goats. They say their criteria is, “I was hungry and you fed me,” or “I was thirsty and you gave me water.” Sometimes we think about that passage, but we don’t think that maybe actually sometimes, we’re the vulnerable people. Even though I went [to Gaza] to serve, I received. I was hungry and they gave me food. I was cold and my medical student offered me a pair of pants because there was no heating at night. I think that’s something that changed me, to receive that kindness from people who have their own challenges.
I learned from my colleagues too about forgiveness. One of my colleagues told me they had US$40,000 stolen from their house. That teaches me about the forgiveness that I need to show in my life.
Do you speak any Arabic?
I don’t speak Arabic. I had a translator for some of the time, and most of the other doctors spoke pretty good English.
What are you doing now back in Canada?
I’m continuing my work here. I’m continuing my work in the emergency department within Indigenous communities and on their land. I’m continuing to speak at conferences about human trafficking. Since I returned from my work in Gaza, I’ve been interviewed by a few different news sources, and I am continuing my advocacy work regarding our response to what’s happening in the genocide in Gaza.
What would you like our readers to know about what’s happening in Gaza?
Gaza is an extremely beautiful place, and it’s a place that that belongs to the indigenous people of Palestine according to international law. At the creation of Israel, there was Palestine and then there was this plan to have Israel there. Seventy-eight per cent of the land was given to Israel and 22 per cent was given to the Palestinian people to keep after that creation. [Note: The initial partition plan was closer to 60-40, but the 78-22 split followed the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.] This is their land according to international law. Unfortunately as the church, we’ve supported genocides in the past or taken away land from Indigenous people. That’s something that we need to be convicted of and work actively against nowadays.
Often we speak about heroes in the past. We talk about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, or we talk about some of the people involved in the abolition movement or ending slavery, the people who were involved in responding to situations which are extremely unjust. We have to realize that we’re living a similar situation in real time. We claim that we follow Jesus. We have to follow Jesus in how he wants us to respond to that situation and show our solidarity. In fact, our solidarity needs to be lined up with God’s solidarity.
How do I see Gaza? I kept telling people that the people of Gaza are beautiful and they’re strong and they deserve everything that’s good. We need to ask all the people of Gaza, regardless of their religious background, what they want us to do for them to help them in this time that is catastrophic, and then we need to respond in line with that.
The Anglican Church of Canada has called for a permanent ceasefire, a “just peace” in Israel and Palestine, release of all captives, immediate flow of humanitarian aid, and an end to the occupation. What would you like to see the church do in trying to stop the genocide in Palestine?
We must take a strong stand that is in line with our brothers and sisters in Palestine. There’ve been many ecumenical statements made by pastors or other theologians in Palestine, and we need to respond to their call to action and their call to support them. I think that’s one of the most important things that the Anglican Church can do.
There’s a lot of actions that we can take. There’s a great fact sheet by Canadian Friends of Sabeel [a national ecumenical organization offering solidarity with Palestinian Christians] that has different actions by category, like how we can pray, how we can [offer] support, how we can help with an arms embargo. For example, I live in Montreal, Quebec, and in Quebec we make some of the weapons that are then sent to Israel. Those bullets that we were pulling out of patients may have actually been made in Quebec.
Anything else you’d like to add?
It’s about the children. Pretty much every human being on earth loves or has loved a child. My challenge for people is to see the children they love in the children of Gaza.
I remember on one particular day, there was this little boy. He was between probably 11 and 14. He was shot by a sniper and he came to our emergency department and he was wandering around. There’s a sequence of things you need to do when you’re in the emergency department, and he was alone. He had no one to guide him through that sequence. He was wandering around wearing a pink backpack, crying. He looked really sad and broken. He was really scared. He’s trying to get the medical care he needs. He originally got shot by the sniper because he went looking for food in an area, because his family had no food. He was trying to be a man and supply the food for his family and ended up in our emergency department.
Or I remember another little boy who was there alone, also shot by a sniper, lying on the bed looking up. Imagine you’re a little boy. You’re looking up and you see all these adults around you and they’re touching your arms and your legs and you’re undergoing procedures, and your mom and your dad aren’t there for hours. That’s really difficult for a little kid.
We see that theme right in the Bible of Jesus caring about kids or God talking about how important children are. We need to take the same posture with the children that we see in Palestine, whether it be in the West Bank or Gaza, and think about what we can do to protect those children. If we wouldn’t accept a particular set of conditions for our children, whether that be our goddaughter, godson, or nephew, or niece, or our biological child, then we need to speak out about those same conditions as they affect those children. As Christians, we believe that everyone is created in the image of God. That means that every Palestinian, every Israeli adult or child, is a beautiful creature of God, and they need to be treasured and valued.
[Gaza] was filled with joy too. I thought that it would be a time that would be difficult or sad, but the experience was so filled with joy. Sometimes you think [when] you go to a vulnerable place, it’s going to be like some kind of humanitarian NGO commercial. But there’s a lot of joy and a lot of love, and I experienced a lot of joy and love while I was there.
The strength of a people to get through something like that is remarkable.
Often we talk about Palestinians being resilient. I don’t want to say that, because when the situation that we need to be resilient with is man-made, we need to deal with the situation, not call the victim resilient.
