Just hours after Austin pediatrician Aman Odeh heard there was an opportunity to go to Gaza on a medical mission in late March, she decided to go.
She said her daughter’s words made her choice certain, and she was on a plane to Cairo a few days later.
“My mother was against it. My husband was just like, ‘You’re going to leave me with three kids? What will happen to us?’” Odeh said. “But my 12-year-old daughter came to me, and she’s like, ‘Mama, everyone says they wish they could do something, and you could do something.’”
The medical mission was affiliated with the international humanitarian organization Glia, which has coordinated 10 medical missions to Gaza since the war began in October.
The Israeli military campaign has killed more than 34,000 people in Gaza since the start of the war, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. It was a response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, when they killed 1,139 people and took more than 250 people hostage, according to Israel.
The medical mission took place between March 20 and April 1.
Odeh has extended family in the West Bank but had never been to Gaza before going in March. She had never participated in a medical mission before either.
Odeh worked mostly in the neonatal care unit, or NICU, at the Al-Helal Al Emirati Maternity Hospital in Rafah, and spent a brief time in the pediatric wards of several other hospitals in south and central Gaza.
Other physicians on the mission worked in nearby hospitals in Rafah. Odeh said they were transported together to their hospitals each morning.
“The bus driver would arrive between 7:45 and 8:00, depending on the day,” Odeh said. “And then we would all load into the van, and he would take us to our respective hospitals.”
Rafah is a southern Gazan city that borders Egypt where an estimated 1.4 million Palestinians are sheltering. It is where Israel recently launched a military assault that the United Nations, United States, and human rights groups have warned would be disastrous.
Odeh said the Emirati Hospital was the last one left in all of Gaza with a functioning NICU.
She described working with the NICU’s medical director, neonatologist Muhammad Salaman.
“He comes in with the best smile, he just uplifts everybody’s spirits,” she said. “[He] jokes with the people, talks to the people, ‘How are you doing?’ He knows everybody’s families. If he’s able to help with money, he’ll give money. If he has some food on him, he’ll give it out. If he has a medication that he’s able to provide for a family, he’ll do that.”
But despite the work by physicians like Salaman, Odeh said the hospitals routinely lacked simple resources like soap, paper towels, and gloves, restricting the care they could offer and forcing doctors to make impossible decisions.
Odeh described her attempt to save a baby from an emergency C-section.
“The baby comes out and is basically dead. Has a pulse, has some breathing, but is bruised all over,” she said. “So I quickly start attempting to resuscitate. Dr. Ahmed comes to me and he’s like, ‘Aman, I know that you want to save this baby, but we only have one ventilator. This baby has a very poor chance of survival.’ So I just had to hold that baby in my arms and let him die.”
She said cases like that baby’s death were daily occurrences in Gaza.
More than 14,000 children under the age of 18 have been killed in Gaza in seven months, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
Odeh said the death is too overwhelming to properly address. “You don’t have time to grieve,” she said. “You just move on very quickly because death is everywhere.”
According to Odeh, the Shuhada Al Aqsa Hospital in Deir Al Balah was one of the worst hospital situations she witnessed.
“There are tents all over,” Odeh said. “People live in the hallways and the stairwells. Not an inch in Shuhada Al Aqsa Hospital is not inhabited by someone. There are no places for patients. If a patient comes in, they’re just put on the ground, on the dirty floor.”
She said the Al-Aqsa hospital was so strained that ICU doctors turned her away when she was treating an eight-year-old girl who needed a ventilator because she expected her respiratory system would begin failing soon.
“They look at us and they’re like, ‘She’s still breathing, we can still wait,’” Odeh said.
She added that the constant risk to their own lives was evident everywhere, including when an Israeli airstrike hit a neighbor’s home overnight.
“It was a very horrific night,” she said. “We thought that night was going to be it. The whole building went down. They were able to retrieve 11 bodies. But everyone in the neighborhood knew that there were over 30 people in that building. But they only counted 11 because the others were under the rubble.”
Odeh said she doesn't understand how countries like the U.S. continued for months to supply weapons to Israel. “As a society who say liberty and justice for all, this is just unbelievable that we are even able to utter these words when we are providing the weapons,” she said.
Last week, the White House for the first time announced it would delay sending certain munitions to Israel as leverage to prevent a full-scale invasion of Rafah. However, the U.S. State Department circumvented Congress multiple times since October to send weapons to Israel.
San Antonio for Justice in Palestinian co-founder Moureen Kaki also traveled to Gaza with Odeh, co-leading the logistics for the mission. That included scheduling meals, coordinating transport for physicians, attending daily United Nations briefings, and shuttling medication back and forth between hospitals.
Kaki also spent time in Gaza with children in refugee camps and collecting oral histories. She is also Palestinian and has family in the West Bank.
“There’s a bit of a selfish reason behind it, if I’m being completely honest,” Kaki said. “We’ve been doing so much work here locally … that has felt so ineffective, like completely and utterly useless.”
In San Antonio, Kaki has organized protests and tried for months to get the city council to vote on a ceasefire resolution. A resolution almost made it to the floor of council in January before a councilmember pulled his support for the effort.
Kaki said she felt like she could do more in Gaza than she could in San Antonio. She said the immense personal danger in Gaza melded into the background of daily life.
“I very quickly developed this like, whatever’s going to happen happens thing, and no matter what I’m gonna do it can’t stop it,” Kaki said. “But, certainly, it never felt safe.”
She said jets and drone sounds were constant during their time in Gaza.
The routes the Glia delegation traveled and the building they lived in while they were in Gaza were “deconflicted” — a term that means the Israeli military was aware of them and committed to not attacking them.
Kaki said it only offered a hollow sense of safety. “The running joke in the delegation was like, 'yeah, that’s gonna help us,' ” Kaki said.
More than 200 aid workers have been killed in Gaza since the Israeli assault began, the highest number of aid workers ever killed in any conflict.
The Israeli military conducted a high-profile strike of a World Central Kitchen convoy in April that killed seven foreign aid workers, which the Israeli government acknowledged and claimed was a mistake.
Kaki said they traveled repeatedly on the same road as the World Central Kitchen convoy in the days before the strike.
But despite the danger Kaki and Odeh faced in Gaza, their experiences have only strengthened their resolve.
Kaki said she plans to return to Gaza on another mission in June, but that humanitarian aid alone will not solve the root of the crisis.
“The problem with Gaza is Israel and its occupation, and the backer behind that — diplomatically, militarily, financially — is the United States,” Kaki said. “And that’s the complicity that we have as citizens in this, and that’s the part that we need to focus on in my opinion.”
Odeh said she began planning her next mission to Gaza as soon as she returned home.
“My kids were texting each other, and I happened to see the text chain,” Odeh said. “My 12- and 14-year-old, they were saying, ‘She wants to go back, she really does.’ My community sees it, I feel it. We’re going to go back to rebuild. The people of Gaza deserve better.”
