Tanya Haj-Hassan examines wounded children at a hospital in central Gaza in March.Abdel Kareem Hana/AP

On Tuesday morning, as the party coalesced around Vice President Kamala Harris at the Democratic National Convention, doctors spoke at a press conference in Chicago about what they witnessed in Gaza since last October as volunteers. At many points, their testimony proved unbearable.

Tanya Haj-Hassan, a pediatric intensive care doctor, described treating children with no surviving relatives—a situation so common an acronym has been needed in the hospitals: WCNSF (Wounded Child, No Surviving Family). She told the audience about holding hands with children as they breathed their final breaths.

Uncommitted delegates to the DNC have been pushing for Haj-Hassan to be able to speak from the main stage of the convention. But, so far, national Democrats have not agreed to that request.

I interviewed two of the doctors after the event. Dr. Ahmad Yousaf is an internist and pediatrician from New Jersey who now practices in Arkansas—primarily in the intensive care unit. He volunteered at the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Gaza for three weeks in June and July. Dr. Nabeel Rana is a vascular surgeon in North Carolina who overlapped with Yousaf at the Al-Aqsa hospital. They did not know each other before meeting in Gaza, but quickly developed a bond born out of shared trauma.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

We’ve seen the images on social media and elsewhere of the scale of the destruction in Gaza. How did that compare with what you saw firsthand?

Dr. Rana: There are no words, pictures, or videos that can really capture what’s happening. As soon as we got to the other side of the Gaza border crossing, it was like this dystopian image out of a movie. I mean it was just dust. It was an annihilation of the entire land. It’s not just buildings that were destroyed. There were things that looked like dirt fields, but I was told, That was an orchard. That was this farm.

Going from the border to our hospital in the middle segment of Gaza, there was nothing normal, no building untouched. Everything was decimated for miles and miles. It wasn’t like this was a target, that was a target. It was like someone steamrolled through the entire city.

Dr. Yousaf: It felt like we were entering a post-apocalyptic movie scene, or a Mad Max world where none of the roads were drivable and none of the homes were habitable. There were people strewn across the streets in tents because that’s all they had. There were others living within the rubble of homes because it was better to have something over your head even if it was completely unstable.

Initially, I thought that it was going to be what we saw on the news and Telegram and Instagram. But when we got there, the devastation was so much worse than I could have imagined was possible in the period of time that this war has been going on.

What were conditions like inside the hospital?

Dr. Yousaf: To call it a hospital at that point was kind of a stretch. It was serving as a temporary shelter for at least half the people on the property. There were tents in and around it. Even within the hospital, the hallways were full of families because they knew that it was a building that was relatively protected.

It was an obstetrics hospital before the war, but it became a trauma ward. The place wasn’t meant to take care of trauma patients. They had three operating theaters and two delivery rooms had been modified into operating theaters. But they were not truly capable of taking care of those kinds of patients.

I watched Dr. Rana do a surgery in which the lights went out multiple times. That was common. The ventilators in the ICU would go out of oxygen. You were just trying to survive and keep people alive in the short term. It didn’t function........

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