I wish I’d died before all this

If we all had been killed, it would have been better than this. It would have been more merciful than this.

I wish I died before all this. I wish I never lived, to witness these endless horrors.

I am a gazan doctor, and I am one hundred percent aware of what I am about to say. If we had all been killed, it would have been more merciful than this. Don't show mercy; just gift us a fucking nuclear bomb, and finish the damned job already!

It's past midnight, and I'm at the hospital, sitting next to my cousin Salah.

Salah has just undergone emergency abdominal surgery for a complicated medical condition.

He woke up this morning in excruciating pain; pain so severe it was unresponsive to all the painkillers I had struggled so hard to obtain. My mother entered my room as I was trying to sleep, her face full of tears and terror, and said, "Salah is dying."

He was carried from home to the hospital by his brothers, over a long distance full of pain. We had to transfer him by ambulance from A-Awda Hospital to Al-Aqsa Hospital, and even that was inhumane: seven patients and seven companions squeezed themselves into the same ambulance, Salah, critically ill elderly people and a newborn among them.

When we arrived at the fully occupied emergency department of A-Aqsa, Salah had to lie on the ground, tortured in pain. The surgeons were already overwhelmed with so many cases they could barely pay attention to each one. The surgeon requested a CT scan for him, and I had to run around for hours just to get it done.

Salah needed emergency abdominal surgery, but it was delayed for hours because we couldn't find a bed for him after the operation. Eventually, he underwent surgery; successful only because Palestinian lives matter, and because great doctors were there fighting against impossible odds to save his life.