While diving into his memories, Mehdi El Melali, a 33-year-old French emergency room doctor, paused, overcome with emotion. No words, he said, could truly capture the hellscape that is the Gaza Strip. He said he only spent three weeks there, from July 4 to July 25, 2024, on a mission organized by the Al-Rahma and PalMed Europe organizations. The violence of his account sharply contrasted with the context he spoke in, a gentle summer evening in a Paris café. "A part of me stayed back there, in a way," he said, apologizing. "I have trouble switching off." Like other European humanitarian workers, he has developed a profound sense of solitude.

"You come back from there transformed," said orthopedic surgeon François Jourdel. The 54-year-old veteran physician completed his first field mission back in 1997, in Angola. Yet Gaza, he said, was unique: "The bombings are relentless and people cannot flee. The whole population is affected." He was far from the only medical professional to express such shock. In many respects, the situation created by Israel's assault on Gaza, which has gone on for 22 months, ever since the Palestinian group Hamas' attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, has been unlike anything they had ever seen elsewhere.

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