Back from Gaza, doctors testify to the disaster and question the European torpor: "Do we still have a little humanity left?"

Delving into his memories, Mehdi El Melali, a French emergency doctor from 33 years old, interrupts himself, overcome by emotion. No words can accurately describe the hell of the Gaza Strip. He spent only three weeks there, from July 4 to 25, 2024, during a mission organized by the organizations Al-Rahma and PalMed Europe. The violence of his story contrasts with the gentleness of this summer evening in a Parisian café. "A part of me stayed there a little ," he apologizes. "I find it hard to switch off." Like other European humanitarians, he has felt a deep loneliness.

"You come back transformed," confirms orthopedic surgeon François Jourdel. At 54, this veteran doctor carried out his first fieldwork in 1997, in Angola. Gaza, he insists, is unique: "The bombings are incessant there and people cannot flee. The entire population is affected." He is not the only professional to make this appalling observation. In many ways, the situation created by the assault by the Jewish state on Gaza – it has been going on for twenty-two months –, following the attack by the Palestinian Hamas against Israel on October 7, 2023, is unlike anything they have seen elsewhere.

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