Pediatrician Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan examines wounded Gazan children at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, Gaza on March 16.Abdel Kareem Hana/The Associated Press
Tanya Haj-Hassan pauses for a moment as she casts her mind back to the boy, maybe eight or nine, who arrived at the hospital in Gaza with a double femoral fracture, an injury that produces pain so searing it is automatically treated with morphine.
When she asked the Palestinian health care workers at her side, they told Dr. Haj-Hassan, a specialist in pediatric intensive care, they had nothing to ease the suffering. The fractures would have to be treated without pain relief.
In Gaza, she says, “we don’t have the anesthesia – the analgesia, the pain control – to even provide a humane death.”
Her eyes begin to well. She has told this story to anyone who will listen. But “that particular thing really gets to me,” she says. She apologizes. “Can I please stop for a second?” she says, and strides away a few paces to calm the tangle of emotions.
Dr. Haj-Hassan has spent years travelling around the world with Médecins Sans Frontières, in addition to her work elsewhere – most recently as a fellow in the department of critical care medicine at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto.
Over the past week, she has circled the heart of American political power gathered in Chicago, clad in scrubs, speaking with politicians, journalists and members of the Palestinian-American community at the Democratic National Convention.
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Dr. Haj-Hassan has pondered the response of Médecins Sans Frontières to Rwanda, where in 1994 it broke with past precedent and called for an armed intervention, saying “you can’t stop genocide with doctors.”
In Gaza, “a lot of humanitarian workers right now are grappling with exactly that,” she says.
Her presence in Chicago formed part of the intensive effort to bend the arc of American foreign policy away from its long-standing support of Israel. A few dozen convention delegates refused to support the nomination of Kamala Harris as the party’s presidential candidate. Hundreds signed a petition urging an immediate ceasefire in Israel. Still more protesters gathered on the streets of Chicago, demanding an arms embargo – or even just a time slot to describe the situation to gathered delegates, and the millions more watching on television.
In the end, they did not succeed.
Democratic party leaders allowed onto their main stage the parents of an American hostage still in Gaza, who described their son’s capture – trapped in a small shelter as militants tossed in grenade after grenade – and their anguish and misery in ensuing months.
No speaker made the same plea for the tens of thousands of dead Gazans.
Had they been allowed, that speaker might have been Dr. Haj-Hassan.
“Our first ask was for Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan to speak from the stage,” says Abbas Alawieh, a delegate to the Democratic convention this week who is among the founders of the Uncommitted National Movement. That movement persuaded hundreds of thousands of voters in the party’s primary to vote “uncommitted,” as a repudiation of President Joe Biden and his stalwart support of Israel.
The war in Gaza has created one of the most fractious divides inside a Democratic party that has boasted a new-found unity behind Ms. Harris as its presidential candidate. The medical profession has become a pillar of the movement advocating for Palestinians.
Dr. Haj-Hassan is someone “who was trying to piece back together children in Gaza who have been blown up into multiple pieces with the weapons that our government is sending,” Mr. Alawieh says. “Someone like her now has the double burden of also telling us from her first-hand account what happened.”
Other doctors, too, brought to Chicago accounts of what they had seen. Chicago emergency physician Tammy Abughnaim returned this week from Gaza, her second trip this year.
“This is the emergency of our time,” she said. She called it the responsibility of the political class “to listen to the witnesses of these crimes.”
While Palestinian journalists continue to operate in Gaza – as reported by the U.S. non-profit Committee to Protect Journalists, more than 100 have been killed since October – Israel has largely barred international media from the area. Doctors have become critical observers, both for those seeking to understand what is happening, and for those pushing for change.
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It is important for medical professionals, particularly Americans, “to be in conversations with lawmakers, to be in conversations with the administration – so that they can maybe invoke their humanity and have them realize that yes, we are seeing people who are dying and suffering,” says Ilhan Omar, a Democrat in Congress. “And it is all being done with our own tax dollars.”
On Thursday, Ms. Harris sought to find a middle ground between the warring groups in the Middle East, promising as she accepted the party’s nomination that “I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself,” while also decrying the suffering and devastation in Gaza. The war must end, she said, so “Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom and self-determination.”
Dr. Haj-Hassan, an American educated at Stanford and Oxford, admits being reluctant to speak out. She risks not being able to return to Gaza – many doctors have been refused repeat visits – and she does not relish entering the political fray.
But she spoke this week with a friend in Gaza who is the first female surgeon there, and who urged her to call on U.S. leadership to force an end to the war.
She said, “just tell them they can stop it. In a second, they can stop it. They say one thing and it’s done,” Dr. Haj-Hassan says.
“And I know that. That’s why I’m here. It’s just really painful having to be face to face with all the hypocrisy.”
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to state that the Committee to Protect Journalists reported the number of journalists killed in Gaza since Oct. 7.