We were just talking with a local colleague in the emergency department of Al-Aqsa Hospital when we heard it. Rocket strikes somewhere in the central part of the Gaza Strip. Deir al-Balah once again. Right in the middle of the officially designated "humanitarian zone" —a title that has never existed in reality. The report came quickly: a prayer room and a medical station in a school where displaced families were seeking shelter had been hit. Within minutes, the first patients arrived. Once again, many of them were children, about 30%.

One of them was a ten-year-old boy with shrapnel in his head. Without surgery, the bleeding could not be stopped. But there was no operating room available. So the decision was made on the spot because there was no alternative left: we let the child die. It took about an hour and a half. At the same time, we had an ambulance and a team on standby, ready for medical evacuations. In thirty minutes, we could have had him in an Israeli hospital.

In forty-five minutes, we could have reached a hospital in Egypt. But spontaneous medical evacuations for Palestinian patients do not exist. I keep asking myself: why should a ten-year-old child be denied life-saving medical care? I have come to the conviction that there is only one answer to this question, and it is the one that no one wants to say out loud. Because Israel is committing a genocide against the Palestinian population.