By Staff Reporter
The memories keep him awake at night. All it takes is for a mobile phone to buzz or an aeroplane to fly low overhead, and his mind snaps back to Gaza, where warplanes streak through the sky and low-rumbling drones herald impending attacks.
Omar Sabha, 44, of Orange County, California, only spent 10 days in Gaza. But what he and other American medical personnel experienced there has left them grappling with the scale of the humanitarian disaster unfolding.
Gaza has been under an Israeli military assault since October last year. More than 37,900 Palestinians have been killed, and another 87,000 have been wounded, straining a healthcare system already in tatters.
And then there are the allegations of human rights abuses. When Sabha first crossed the Gaza-Egypt border in April, he told Al Jazeera he was plunged into a chaotic scene.
Trucks were everywhere. People scrambled to collect their bags. And in their midst, Sabha noticed a man carrying eggs, a seemingly odd sight. He later found out that the man worked for World Central Kitchen, a nonprofit delivering food to hungry Palestinians.
That was the last time Sabha saw the man and his team alive. “They left 20 minutes before I did,” he said. “Forty minutes after we got to our hospital, they were brought in dead.”
They were the first corpses Sabha saw on his arrival at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir el-Balah, south of Gaza City.
Israeli forces had bombed the aid workers’ convoy — something the Israeli government described as an accident but rights groups called a possible war crime.
To this day, Sabha is still haunted by the pulse of the airstrikes he heard. “That sound never goes away in my head,” he said.
