Little Rock doctor returns home from volunteering at Gaza hospital

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. – A doctor from Little Rock is back home from a medical mission in Gaza.

Dr. Ahmad Yousaf is a pediatrician and internal medicine doctor in Arkansas. For the last month, he’s volunteered at a Gaza hospital trying to save lives in the war between Hamas and Israel.

“I wasn’t prepared for that emotionally, mentally or from a medical skills perspective,” Yousaf said.

He said he landed back in Arkansas Thursday night and was met with a warm welcome from family and friends with hugs and signs.

He is happy to be reunited with his wife and three kids, but he said there are two feelings he felt when leaving Gaza: guilt and that he has to go back.

He said the guilt comes from a feeling of “betrayal” because he got to leave but those there didn’t have that option.

Yousaf said he’s “been on many other medical missions but never one where the population we were treating was trapped.”

In Gaza, Yousaf said he was faced with the constant sound of bombs, and drones and the sight of injured and lifeless people, describing it as a “zombie apocalypse.”

“We saw exposed brain matter. I saw eviscerated children. I saw kids without limbs and their parents all had the same look on their face like, ‘Help me fix this problem.’”

Yousaf volunteered at one of Gaza’s only remaining hospitals where resources to care for patients were thin.

“I felt hopeless and helpless,” he said.

He said he was there when a school was bombed, killing 16 people and injuring more than 50 others.

“Just child after child came in,” he described.  “Many dead on arrival.”

Yousaf said the hospital “didn’t have enough machines to breathe for them if they needed ventilators or inhalation injury.”

He said “it’s a lie” when people say humanitarian aid was let into Gaza.

“I personally had multiple suitcases from wonderful people here in Arkansas of donations and gifts and medical supplies that were left because they were declined at the border,” he said.

Officials say more than 38,000 people have been killed in Gaza in nine months, but Yousaf said that number doesn’t tell the full story.

“When you don’t die on the day of the bombing they don’t consider it a death of the bombing,” he said. “But if you die from a wound infection 2 days later because of no medical supplies and we can’t clean your wound properly and you got the wound from the bombing that happened 2 days ago, you are not included into the statistic currently.”

Yousaf said this is just one example of victims not being counted in the death total.

“When you die because you can’t get to dialysis because the dialysis machines have all been destroyed, they don’t include you in the numbers of those who were killed in the bombing,” he said.

Yousaf said when the war is over, he feels the death total will be “a few hundred thousand people easily.”

He said even through all the devastation those in Gaza are experiencing, they showed appreciation to him, with some even giving him gifts to take back home.

“They have nothing. They don’t have food for tomorrow and they are giving me gifts because they are grateful that we came for a couple of weeks,” he said with tears in his eyes.

“There’s nothing like what’s happening there and there’s nothing like those people,” Yousaf said. “So there is no doubt that when the moment presents itself I will take the opportunity to try to go back and help.”

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to KARK.