Dr. Nahreen Ahmed has now become one of the most significant medical witnesses to the situation affecting children in Gaza. She is a pulmonary and critical care physician from Philadelphia, works as a volunteer with MedGlobal, and has already been in Gaza five different times. Each time she comes back from a visit, she has more stories than any doctor ever ought to have to tell. At her speech to the United Nations, she did not include any statistics or use any diplomatic wording; instead, she brought the children she has treated — those who survived, those who did not, and those who are still stuck in a system that has collapsed around them.
Dr. Ahmed talks about the kids she held in her hands. She describes wounds that don’t make sense on a child’s body — shrapnel tearing through limbs, quadcopter bullets entering and exiting in multiple places, crush injuries from buildings pancaked on top of families. She says the infections set in almost immediately because there are no antibiotics left. She says children are dying from wound infections that should never kill anyone in 2026. She says surgeries are being done without anesthesia. She says dialysis machines don’t exist anymore. She says even pain relief is gone.
Dr. Ahmed tells the United Nations that the hospitals are no longer hospitals; instead they have become shelters, food queues, orphanages, and morgues all in the same place. Thousands of displaced families sleep within them. Children lie on the floors, in the stairwells and down the corridors. It is impossible to carry out infection control and disease spreads through the buildings as easily as smoke. She states that she had to treat children who were starving while at the same time dealing with infections, while also attending to wounds caused by bombs, and while also being dehydrated since clean water is hardly available.
Her warnings concerning hunger are some of the most serious. She states that the rate of malnutrition among children under the age of five has surged from less than one per cent before the war to 16 per cent in northern Gaza. She says that children are dying as a result of hunger coupled with disease, and that even if aid were to arrive suddenly the damage would already be too great. She says that she witnessed children whose bodies had already started to shut down. She also says that she saw babies whose growth had completely stopped.
UN officials have quoted her testimony directly. OCHA expressed its appreciation for her "powerful testimony" regarding Palestinian children and cited her words to emphasize that the suffering in question was preventable—rather than accidental or unavoidable, it was the outcome of a system which obstructs humanitarian access and destroys the infrastructure necessary for keeping children alive.
The fact that Dr. Ahmed has experience makes her evidence much more difficult to ignore. She has worked in Yemen, Ukraine, Sudan, Syria and in the Rohingya camps; she set up the Bangladesh Ultrasound Initiative and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. She is not new to crisis areas and is not easily shocked. However, Gaza has had an effect on her, something which she admits and states that she has never before seen children suffer so much.
Her appearance at the UN was not a speech; it was a warning, a statement of facts, and a request that the world cease pretending it does not know what is going on. She demanded the fundamental conditions necessary for a child to live—such as food, water, medicine, and safety—and she asked the world to stop treating the death of Palestinian children as normal.
The testimony is now held in the UN archives, in the humanitarian briefings, and in the interviews given to Democracy Now!, NPR, and OCHA. It forms part of the increasing amount of evidence provided by doctors who have worked within Gaza's dysfunctional medical system. It is included in the account that will be told long after this genocide is over, and it is also one of the reasons why the world cannot claim it didn't know.
