‘Half-Amputees, Children with Severe Burns’: US Nurse Who Was Stationed in Gaza Describes Horror – News18

Emily Callahan, an American nurse who was treating injured civilians in Gaza, told news agency CNN that there is no safe place in Gaza. Callahan said displaced people’s camps in Gaza have over 50,000 people with only four toilets and four hours of running water.

She also said that Palestinian doctors and nurses who are still in Gaza are “heroes” because they are going to die but have chosen to stay anyway while speaking to CNN’s Anderson Cooper.

“There is no safe place in Gaza,” Callahan said.

Callahan is associated with Doctors Without Borders and was working in Gaza City. She returned to the US after being evacuated from Gaza. She said she is happy to return home but is “having a really hard time finding any joy in any of it”. “Because me being safe is the result of having to leave people behind,” Callahan said.

“There were 35,000 internally displaced people. There were children with just massive burns down their faces, necks, all over their limbs. Because the hospitals are so overwhelmed, they are being discharged immediately,” she further added.

She said that she faced the anger of Palestinian civilians who had injured children with half-amputations and severe burn marks. “Desperate people who are losing loved ones right and left are angry. And they would point at me and scream ‘American’. They would yell things in Hebrew to see if we were Israeli. They accused our national staff of either being traitors or said, ‘you are pretending to be Arab’” Callahan said.

Callahan, however, thanked her Palestinian colleagues for not leaving her side.

The American nurse said that she would return to Gaza if given another opportunity. “My heart is in Gaza, it will stay in Gaza. The Palestinian people I worked with were some of the most incredible people I’ve met in my life,” Callahan told the news agency.