Thomas Breen photo
Nour Ebid at Monday's vigil: "This is a global catastrophe."
With microphone in hand, Nour Ebid transported a crowd of 100 mourning Yalies to a hospital floor in Gaza where a 9‑year-old Palestianian boy saw his injured leg amputated in “a nonsterile field, without anesthesia, without appropriate sedation.”
The Yale New Haven Hospital physician associate then moved the crowd to a medical setting much closer to home, where “every single surgical procedure requires utmost care and absolute sterility.”
“We swear a sacred oath to do no harm,” Ebid said about her work as a local healthcare professional. “And it is our duty to call on this university and demand a ceasefire now.”
Ebid was one of a half-dozen speakers at an hour-long prayer vigil Monday evening that was organized by Yalies for Palestine on the university’s downtown campus.
At Monday's event on Yale's campus.
More than 100 people, mostly Yale students, gathered in a circle by the Women’s Table in front of Sterling Library to write down the names and hear the stories of Palestinians who have been killed by Israeli airstrikes over the past three weeks.
The vigil marked just the latest effort by New Haveners and Yalies to publicly reckon with and grieve the escalating violence in the Middle East.
Writing the names of Palestinians who have died since Oct. 7.
Ebid, a Yale physician associate from Manhattan whose parents are from Egypt, spoke candidly to the crowd about how her work as a healthcare provider informs her understanding of just how dire a humanitarian crisis is playing out in Gaza.
She grounded her speech in a story recently relayed by the director of Doctors Without Borders when talking about how seriously Gazan hospitals are struggling under Israeli bombs and blockades.
That story, Ebid said, is of a 9‑year-old boy with “a crushing leg injury requiring partial amputation.” As so much of Gaza is currently without medical supplies, she said, “his leg was amputated on the hospital floor.” In conditions that patients here in New Haven would, correctly, find terrifying to behold.
“I have scrubbed in for cases where patients were sedated for minimally invasive procedures, and understandably so,” Ebid said. “All procedures are at least somewhat invasive and uncomfortable, and we must minimize infection in every capacity. We as healthcare professionals understand this. And yet a nine-year-old boy was amputated without pain management, without anesthesia, without sterility, with damaged equipment.”
This boy did not receive post-operative antibiotics, she said. He didn’t have a family or home to care for him after the procedure. “This is in violation of all that we stand for as medical professionals.”
The health dangers posed to Palestinians at this time, she continued, are not just matters of anesthesia and sterile surgical environments.
Access to clean and safe drinking water is becoming increasingly limited in Gaza, she said, exposing residents to risk of cholera and shigella; generators are running out of fuel, putting neonatal incubators at risk of becoming nonfunctional; more and more people are being displaced to southern Gaza, making an already crowded area “a breeding ground for illness;” “those with severe disease do not have access to overcrowded treatment.”
Ebid concluded her remarks by returning to her calling and work as a healthcare professional at Yale.
“This is a global catastrophe, and as healthcare workers we obligated to stand with those who are underserved and demand equal access to food, water, medicine, warmth, safety, security,” she said.
“I grieve with parents and children who have lost their loved ones and homes. And I stand with the hospital employees who are working mercilessly under inhumane conditions. Our oath encompasses fellow healthcare professionals across the globe, and I want to make it clear that healthcare workers stand in solidarity with Palestine.”