The New York Times reports:

The memories are indelible. Screaming families carrying bloodied loved ones through the doors of an overcrowded hospital. A boy trying to resuscitate a child who looked not much older than himself. A 12-year-old with shrapnel wounds to his head and abdomen being intubated on the ground.

What he saw that January day at the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis in southern Gaza — after a missile strike on an aid distribution site — has haunted Dr. Zaher Sahloul, an American critical care specialist with years of experience treating patients in war zones, including in Syria and Ukraine.

He and other volunteer doctors who have returned from besieged hospitals in Gaza took their firsthand accounts to Washington this week, hoping to convey the suffering to the Biden administration and senior government officials and to press for an immediate cease-fire.

Dr. Sahloul showed American officials — including members of Congress and officials from the White House, State Department, Defense Department and the United States Agency for International Development — a photo of the 12-year-old boy and his death certificate. The child never woke up from surgery after being intubated, the doctor said, and the hospital could not reach his family amid a near-total communications blackout.

Two other doctors in the delegation — Amber Alayyan, a Paris-based deputy program manager for Doctors Without Borders, and Nick Maynard, a British surgeon — said that medical system in Gaza had been wiped out by the war between Israel and Hamas.

“This is the deliberate destruction of the whole health care system,” Dr. Maynard said in an interview. [Continue reading…]