FOR A YEAR, ISRAEL HAS TARGETED doctors, mosques, mothers, fathers, churches, journalists, hospitals, toddlers, cats, horses, apartment complexes, and universities in Gaza. It has aired the torture of Palestinians on national television. Many have articulated this point: we are witnessing the first live streamed genocide.

I come across a photo of a man bursted under the weight of an Israeli tank, his insides outside a body rendered beyond recognition—save his right arm. I watch doctors at a makeshift press conference tally the horrors committed against their people, their voices impossibly steady. I watch children stage their own press conference, asking, in practiced English and with crushing earnestness, for the violence to end.

The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish writes that Gaza “does not compel people to cool contemplation.” Neither does it compel people to detachment. As the West is sustaining this genocide, nothing those of us living here do is enough. Many have decided that their role against Israel’s aggression should be to “bear witness,” to watch video after video and to share these—as if “raising awareness” were its own end point. This shrunken understanding of “witness,” akin to paralyzing despair, takes different forms that meet at the same self-facing nothing—this cannot break the siege; this will not stop the bombs; this will not return the people to their land. The accompanying guilt, even as it floods the senses, is not a productive emotion if it does not transmute into something kinetic, like anger, appropriately channeled.

The idea of “bearing witness” from my relative safety reminds me of John Berger’s “rubble of words.” In his 2006 essay “Undefeated Despair,” Berger surveys the landscape of occupied Palestine, walking the reader through its checkpoints, its past and present, and its poetry. He tallies, too, “the opposite of rubble” in Palestine: the concrete walls, separation fences, and barriers erected to break, stall, “secure.” He weighs language—that of the United Nations and its resolutions, its anguished witness—against the rubble, everywhere, of “houses, roads, and the debris of daily lives.”

I find Berger’s formulation useful because of how exactly “rubble” materializes the time when it is too late. We—those of us represented by the United Nations—might have found a way to stop the home demolitions or the occupation that led to them. Instead, we condemn, staring at our feet in shame. Witness, employed in the ways Berger critiques—condemning something after it is done—shows us an unbearable world. Witness becomes not a commitment to life but to a particular aftermath, which is to say, more Palestinians will be killed, and we will commit to committing them to memory.

Beyond this narrowed version of bearing witness, what’s one to do? How does one arrive at what Berger sees in Palestine, a “despair without fear, without resignation, without a sense of defeat, [one that] makes for a stance towards the world here such as I have never seen before”? Each of us—pulsing with indignation after witnessing injustice—is able to intervene differently, depending on our training. As a resident physician, I have found myself preoccupied with the question of how a doctor’s training equips them to act, in service of life or death, depending on their politics. In recent months, most American doctors have sided with death, unwilling to offer even their wilted voices for Gaza. This, as more than eight hundred of their Palestinian colleagues have been targeted, one by one by one, for trying to provide life-saving care—with the limited resources available under a siege accelerated by genocidal intent—for a people whom Israel has decided must not survive.

Still, for decades, doctors from around the world, their suitcases packed with supplies, have traveled to Palestine and its people’s refugee camps in Beirut and Saida and elsewhere. A few, like Drs. Pauline Cutting and Mads Gilbert, later took the time to document their experiences in English, through memoir. In recent months I have revisited these records to remind myself of what witness beyond despair can look like. Among the most compelling of these texts is Dr. Ang Swee Chai ’s From Beirut to Jerusalem, first published in 1989 and updated a few times since to include testimonies of Israeli assaults against Palestine in the intervening years. Ang, an orthopedic surgeon, provides an eyewitness account of the Sabra and Shatila massacre of 1982. Her experience and everything that followed exposed her to the limitations of medicine emptied of politics and of doctoring—tending to one person at a time—while facing a death machine. Rereading From Beirut to Jerusalem now, I’m struck by how little Israel’s conduct, including its targeting of medical infrastructure, has changed in the past forty years. The intentions—which can be distilled as the elimination of a people—are consistent, the means updated to fit the technology of the day. I’m struck too by how rare a voice like Ang’s remains, how few doctors are willing to articulate the intentions to which the bodies they tend testify.

Ang recounts how it all started for her: she turned on the news to “horrible scenes of wounded and dead,” many of whom were children, from Beirut. Israel was bombing “densely populated, civilian areas” while it denied people water, electricity, and food. Well, she thought, “there had to be a good reason for it.” Ang was an evangelizing Christian Zionist in the summer of 1982, and for her, Palestinian meant “PLO” meant “terrorist.” Still, the scenes rattled her. When a friend called to say a Christian medical group was looking for an orthopedic surgeon for a mission to the refugee camps in Beirut, Ang took it as a sign from God. In August, she left London and headed to Cyprus because Israel had shut down Lebanon’s airport. From Cyprus she took a ferry across that sliver of Mediterranean Sea, as one of about a hundred medics from around the world who “had all left [their] homes to help the wounded people of Lebanon.”

Her writing from her early months in West Beirut tracks a rapid shift in her political consciousness. Upon her arrival, she met the leadership of the Palestine Red Crescent Society, or PRCS, the backbone of Palestinian health care infrastructure both within and without Palestine, and of whom—given its affiliation with the PLO—she was suspicious. An Italian Swiss official, who’d given up his post with the International Red Cross to work for PRCS, gave a tour through the PRCS medical facilities, named “Haifa” and “Gaza,” after places in Palestine its people refused to relegate to a forgotten past. He made clear, as if to thwart any bubbling paternalism, that before the Israeli invasion the Red Crescent had no shortage of staff. (During the first week of the invasion, back in June, the Israelis had arrested 150 doctors and nurses.) Eventually, their car stopped at what the official said was Akka Hospital—it “looked like a demolition site,” “no hospital left.” He led them down a partially collapsed staircase (“A dungeon?” Ang worried). He lit a flashlight, and she found herself in a hospital basement qua hospital. The staff appeared “haggard and traumatized.”

Another question ballooned in her throat. But she knew the answer: Ang had already accepted that being a doctor would “confer no immunity where [the] Israelis were concerned.” While she had been waiting in Cyprus, the IDF targeted yet another International Red Cross aid ship. If today, “red line” means “go” and the Israelis continue to call their occupation soldiers “defense forces,” back then language folded, too: the wholesale destruction of Lebanon and occupation of its south in 1982 was named “Peace for Galilee.” Long-standing symbols, Ang learned, could be reinterpreted at will: rotate a cross, the international marker of medical immunity, just forty-five degrees, and it becomes an x, marking the spot: a “target for Israeli bombardment.”

Ang was assigned to Gaza Hospital in the Sabra and Shatila camps. It had migrated its operating rooms to the basement and soundproofed the surgeons’ walls to limit their distraction by the sounds of explosions or panicked screams that accompanied new mass casualties arriving in the trauma bay above them. By early September some 14,000 PLO fighters had evacuated Beirut as part of a ceasefire agreement with the Israelis. This was in exchange for guarantees of Palestinian civilians’ protection by an international peacekeeping force fronted by the United States, Israel’s principal backer.

A relative calm permeated Beirut. The “camp folks,” as Ang affectionately dubbed the Palestinian refugees, got to rebuilding. “Life, abundant life, had returned.” Akka Hospital, which only a week prior had been “merely a mess of rubble . . . was now swept clean,” its ground floor restored within days. Ang found herself invested in this genesis, climbing each day to an upper floor of Gaza Hospital to take in the rapidly changing landscape all around her—the applied force of a people’s unrelenting “will to survive.”

By September 16, Israeli tanks encircled Sabra and Shatila. The Phalange, a Lebanese militia and Israeli proxy force, entered the camps as the Israelis lit up the night sky with flares for them. Soon after, “casualties poured” into Gaza Hospital, as did people seeking shelter. Two PRCS ambulances sent on a “rescue mission” never returned. Ang and a couple of the other on-call surgeons operated through the night, and then the next day, not entirely sure what was happening outside. In the brief moments she left the operating room to assess the operability of new injuries, she heard machine-gun fire and wondered whether the PLO evacuation had been incomplete after all, as the Israelis had claimed and the BBC had parroted. But her patient demographic mirrored that of the camp. The majority of those injured and martyred were elderly, children, women, their patterns of injury suggesting close-range executions. “It just made no sense.” Something was very wrong.

On September 18 a group of soldiers claiming to be Lebanese rounded up Ang and her foreign medical colleagues. Ang was so angry to be forced to leave her patients—many of whom were freshly postoperative and needed close monitoring—that she failed to register the threat these soldiers posed to her own life. The soldiers led the medical workers at gunpoint down Rue Sabra, past groups of civilians rounded up by armed men. Finally, the doctors were stopped, and the soldiers aimed their guns at them. Ang found herself “too angry to be fearful.” An Israeli officer intervened and escorted the foreign doctors to the Israeli military’s Beirut headquarters, where, in front of an Israeli film crew, Ang and her colleagues “were assured that everything possible would be done to keep [their] patients safe.” Once the “misunderstanding” was sorted out, the medical staff were dropped off at the American embassy. The two allowed to return to the camp were given permission slips written in Hebrew by the soldiers.

Over seventy-two hours, the majority of which Ang spent operating underground, at least fifteen hundred Palestinians were slaughtered in what came to be known as the Sabra and Shatila massacre. Israel denied direct involvement. When Ang returned to the camps, decaying bodies lay everywhere. She remembered the children who had clung to her at the hospital, perceiving her as a kind of anchor. These children had called her a “brave doctor.” But she was “merely uninformed. Anyway I had been working so hard that I had no time to be afraid.” Her final patient, before the soldiers came and took her, was an eleven-year-old boy with three gunshot wounds. He had spent hours trapped under twenty-seven bodies of people who loved him, and whom he loved in return, until his friends searched through these bodies to find him, alive, then risked their lives to bring him in to seek care.

These were the children to whom Ang decided she would commit her life. In the massacre’s aftermath, some days she roamed the camp looking for familiar faces; one afternoon, “someone small threw his arms around” her. It was Mahmoud, a boy she had treated for a wrist broken while helping his father rebuild their home, weeks prior. Now, Mahmoud was crying. He had, from his hiding place, watched the soldiers take Ang away. They had killed his father. And he’d worried they’d killed her, too.

The back cover of From Beirut to Jerusalem includes a photograph of children with messy hair and goofy smiles, one’s head mischievously poking through a pair of touching, tanned arms. They had gathered around Ang, asking for a picture. As she focused her camera, “they all held up their hands and made victory signs, right in front of their destroyed homes, where many had been killed.” Theirs was a learned response. The world beyond the camps showed these children a future that refused their place in it. So, these children refused this world. In a letter to her husband that evening, Ang wrote, “I looked into the face of death and have seen its power and ugliness, but I have also looked into its eyes, and seen its fear. For our children are coming, and they are not afraid.”

“Our children.” I have seen in the past many months these words circulating from James Baldwin, that “the children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe.” (Baldwin was writing for The Nation about a selection of presidential candidates—Reagan and Carter—“as well equipped to run the world as [he was] to run a post office.”) His paragraph about children continues, “we, the elders, are the only models children have. What we see in the children is . . . what they see in us.” The children of the camps saw modeled, in the adults who loved them, how a person might be, and the beginning of a different world. And Ang, watching these children, understood what they had seen, what and whom Palestine was for.

AMONG THE DOCTOR’S TASKS is to make a new world—or resuscitate an old one. To look straight at death. But “death” has many faces, and doctors—people—will see different things depending on what they’re looking for. Despite also having traveled to Beirut to “help,” some of Ang’s Western colleagues found themselves unprepared to work with so few resources. They concealed their “incompetence under a cloak of blustering immodesty,” thinking they “ought to be one up on the ‘natives.’” Some complained to the Western press that coming to Beirut had been a waste of their time, as there was little for them to do. Ang thought to tell them to pick up a broom. That the city’s medical infrastructure was destroyed, and who had destroyed it, they didn’t think to mention.

Ang decided to testify before an Israeli commission investigating the Sabra and Shatila massacre—not without naivete, as it ultimately found no Israeli directly responsible. For testifying, she was told by the head of the medical organization sponsoring her in Lebanon that she should “shut [her] mouth” and be “a proper surgeon,” lest she get herself, her colleagues, or him in trouble. So, Ang resigned from the organization. She was uninterested in his advice and the impossible idea of “neutrality.” She would do the smallest thing she owed her patients: say, to whoever would listen, who killed them.

Ang dismissed a practice of medicine that refused to consider the world. If, by attending to the political, she should be accused of compromising her “objectivity” as a doctor, then so be it. For her Palestinian colleagues, a detached approach had always been nonviable. During the Israeli assault on Beirut, medical staff began referring to the symptoms of children suffering shell shock, physical trauma, and whose families had been murdered, collectively as “Reagan-Begin syndrome.” They had to go upstream to describe the actual etiology of the harm. In October 2023 doctors in Gaza coined a chilling abbreviation to fill an unprecedented semantic need: WCNSF, “wounded child, no surviving family.” What’s a child’s family to do with their healing status? Well, everything.

Mary Turfah is a writer and resident physician.