On 1 July 2024, the European hospital in Gaza evacuated all patients and staff. On that day I should have been shoulder to shoulder with my colleagues. I should have been tending gravely injured patients. I should have been helping them to flee. On ventilators, hooked up to IV fluids, on gurneys, in and out of consciousness and clinging to life, they had done nothing to deserve their situation, and they deserved my help.

Instead, I watched from my home in Texas and read messages from the other medics, as an overcrowded hospital transformed into a ghost town. With anguish, I witnessed the tragedy unfold from afar.

A week earlier, I had been in Jordan with the rest of my team, preparing to cross into Gaza for our humanitarian mission. However, less than 48 hours before we attempted the Rafah border crossing, the Israeli military refused my entry “due to Palestinian roots”.

I had been previously to the European hospital on a medical mission in April, and at that time the authorities had voiced no objections to my entry. At the hospital, conditions were those of a war zone: 500 critically injured patients in a 200-bed facility. And yet, staff prevailed against the odds to deliver life-sustaining and life-saving care every day. For two weeks I performed orthopaedic surgeries on patients who would have died had they not........

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