I have actually finished writing Part One of my piece on women in Iran. I’ve been procrastinating over it, trying to work out the best way to tell their stories. But this felt like the more important piece to share this week.
“My uncle is dying.”
The message came from my close friend in Gaza.
“I am with him at the hospital.”
Uncle had a serious heart problem.
I should explain the uncle. He is not my uncle by blood. But in both of our cultures, family has never been confined entirely to bloodlines. We grow up calling elders auntie and uncle, sometimes out of respect, sometimes affection, and sometimes simply because they belong to someone we love.
My friend is one of the people closest to me, and over the years his family has become part of my life too. Their losses are losses I mourn. Their worries become worries I carry. So somewhere along the way, his uncle simply became our uncle.
And for many reasons I don’t need to explain here, that is exactly how I think of him.
Under ordinary circumstances, there would have been medical options. Surgery. A coronary stent. Doctors deciding which treatment offered him the best chance.
But these were not ordinary circumstances.
This was Gaza.
The equipment required for open-heart surgery was not available. Neither were the specific coronary stents his doctors needed, or any coronary stents at all for that matter.
So instead of doctors discussing which procedure was best for their patient, we began discussing how to get tiny pieces of medical equipment across a border.
Could the ICRC help? The Red Cross? Could we find a foreign doctor entering Gaza who might be able to carry the stents in? What measurements did the doctors need? How quickly could we get them? And, hanging over every conversation, how much time did uncle have?
Then my friend said, “Why don’t you put it on social media?”
I have more than 23,000 followers on Instagram. On paper, that sounds useful.
In reality, my account has been so heavily restricted for years that people tell me they cannot find me. Others are warned before following me. My posts frequently disappear from feeds. Features appear and disappear from my account. A post can reach a tiny fraction of 23,000 people.
Still, we had nothing to lose.
I posted.
I also put it on Substack. Some of you may have seen it.
On Instagram, I collaborated with healthcare workers in Ireland, Scotland and England, people who have become part of the strange international network that has formed around Gaza over the past three years.
And somehow, the message travelled.
On the second day, an Australian doctor contacted me. She was going into Gaza. But there was one problem. She would not be entering until mid September. None of us knew whether his uncle had until mid September.
The other problem: I would have to source the stents myself.
So I started calling people.
A wonderful friend of mine had extensive connections in biotechnology and began approaching companies he thought might be able to help. I started researching manufacturers and suppliers in Australia. Another friend working in the medical industry tried to work out what might be possible.
And I discovered how extraordinarily difficult it is for an ordinary person to obtain coronary stents. Understandably I guess.
They are highly regulated medical devices and come in specific dimensions. They are distributed through controlled medical supply chains. This was not something I could simply buy, put into a bag and hand to a doctor. And even if I had been able to buy them, the cost was prohibitive.
Every path seemed to lead to another obstacle.
Meanwhile, in Gaza, my friend was working through every option he could find.
He contacted organisations. Hospitals. Doctors. Anyone who might know someone who knew someone who could find what his uncle needed.
His uncle’s psychological state was deteriorating. As far as he was concerned, there was no viable option left. Only death.
I began losing hope too.
At one stage, I began muttering towards the sky, asking for direction, as I tend to do these days when all the logical options start to feel like a pipe dream. Almost as quickly as I had asked, I went back to work and forgot I had done it.
That afternoon, though, I checked Instagram again. I’m not sure why. By then, Instagram felt like a dead zone that I no longer bothered with, and I had little reason to believe anything would come of it.
There was another message.
A medical specialist in the United States.
“I am going in.”
I sent her my number.
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For all the restrictions, suppression and frustrations of platforms like Meta, many of us continue to use them for exactly this reason. Sometimes, somehow, a message still finds the person it needs to find. This was one rare instance.
She knew a surgeon who was due to enter Gaza. They had already been trying to obtain specific stents for another patient, the aunt of a doctor working in one of Gaza’s hospitals.
They understood exactly what I was asking. And suddenly this impossible request was moving again. She went back to the person who had sourced the other patient’s stents and asked whether he could find ours.
I waited.
The answer came back.
No.
He couldn’t source the sizes we needed.
Another dead end.
Except she didn’t stop.
She contacted another supplier.
This time, in Jordan.
They had stents.
The plan that followed tells you almost everything you need to know about practising medicine in Gaza today.
The surgeon would fly into Jordan. She would go to the supplier and collect the stents. That same night, she would wait to learn whether she had been approved to enter Gaza. If she was approved, she would carry them in herself. If she was rejected, she would hand them to another medical worker in Jordan who had received approval.
Then we would wait again.
Because even if the doctor was permitted to enter, there was no guarantee the stents would be. They could be confiscated at the border. The doctor herself could be turned back.
At every stage, the entire plan could collapse.
I updated my friend step by step.
We allowed ourselves to become hopeful, but never completely. We both understood how quickly that hope could disappear. For his uncle, the stakes were considerably higher.
Psychologically, the entire process felt like warfare.
Every single step came with hope and the expectation that it would probably fail. Nothing was guaranteed. Finding the right stents wasn’t guaranteed. Finding someone willing to carry them wasn’t guaranteed. The doctor being approved to enter wasn’t guaranteed. The stents making it through the border wasn’t guaranteed.
In fact, at almost every stage, it felt more likely to fail than succeed.
So you learned not to celebrate anything. Good news wasn’t really good news. It was simply the next hurdle cleared, with another one waiting immediately behind it. You allowed yourself a few seconds of hope, then pulled yourself back. Because the higher you allowed that hope to climb, the further there was to fall.
And for Uncle, we couldn’t take that risk at all.
Yesterday was the day the surgeon was supposed to travel to Jordan, pick up the stents and wait to see if she was approved to enter. She would find out tonight.
There was something else I didn’t know at the time.
My friend had actually been in contact with the doctor who eventually brought the stents in. What he didn’t know was that the doctor had managed to get hold of them and was going to attempt to carry them into Gaza.
Until then, we hadn’t really considered this a viable option. Getting the exact stents was difficult enough. Getting them through the border was another matter entirely.
The doctor had deliberately chosen not to tell him or the family. Not because there was no hope, but because there was still too much that could go wrong.
The stent could be stopped at the border. The doctor could be turned back. Until it was physically inside Gaza, there was no point telling a family that something was coming when nobody could promise that it would arrive. The doctor had decided it was kinder to spare them the hope than risk having to take it away again. Something, I suppose, doctors learn to do well.
I was different. I needed that tiny bit of hope to keep going.
Throughout those two weeks, I had been updating my friend on almost every step from my side. Every new contact. Every possibility. Every small breakthrough.
And every time, I wondered whether I was doing the right thing.
I would get excited, then contain myself.
He would thank me, then contain himself.
We both understood what we were doing. We were allowing ourselves just enough hope to keep going, while knowing that at any moment it could disappear.
Neither of us told Uncle.
Not about the doctor. Not about Jordan. Not about the stents we were trying to source. We would tell him when we knew. When the stents were actually inside Gaza. Until then, hope itself felt like something we had to handle carefully.
And yesterday I received another message from Gaza.
“I am going to the hospital now.”
I stared at the phone, waiting for the next sentence.
I dreaded what it might say.
Then it arrived.
“A doctor has entered with the stents ya rohi.”
He had found them. All those calls he had been making inside Gaza, all those conversations with doctors and organisations, all those attempts that seemed to lead nowhere, had finally produced something.
“I am going to pick it up now and deliver it to the hospital.”
The operation was performed yesterday.
As I write this, his uncle is stable.
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For two weeks, people across Gaza, Australia, Britain, Ireland, Scotland, the United States and Jordan had been trying to solve a problem that should never have existed.
A man needed a stent.
That was all.
A small medical device used routinely in hospitals around the world had required an international network of strangers, doctors, manufacturers, suppliers and intermediaries to try to move it across a border before a man’s heart gave out.
Once I knew his uncle had received the stent, I waited for confirmation that it was the right one, that the procedure had been performed and that it had worked. Then I immediately contacted the doctor in the United States.
The stents she had been arranging for us were no longer needed.
The surgeon who had intended to carry them was still in Jordan, waiting.
“Can they be used for somebody else?” I asked, knowing that coronary stents are so specific to each patient that the chances were slim.
Perhaps we could bring something else instead. Medicines. Equipment. Something another patient desperately needed.
Because his uncle is hardly alone.
There are thousands of people in Gaza living with illnesses and injuries that would be treatable elsewhere, while doctors work without the medicines, equipment and supplies they need.
Then she told me about the other patient. The aunt of the doctor in Gaza.
There was good news there too. Her stents had been found. They had been sourced. They were ready. Someone was preparing to carry them into Gaza the very next day. After all the searching and waiting, what she needed was finally on its way.
But it was too late.
While her stents waited to cross the border, she died.
This is not a story about unfortunate logistics. It is not about a stent simply being stuck on the wrong side of a border. This is what Israel’s blockade of medical supplies and equipment into Gaza looks like in the life of an actual human being.
For years, Israel has restricted medical equipment, spare parts and other supplies from entering Gaza, including items it classifies as “dual-use”. During this war, those restrictions have become catastrophic. Hospitals have been left without medicines, equipment, replacement parts and basic supplies while doctors are expected to somehow keep people alive.
And still the world accepts the explanations:
Security. Dual-use. Coordination. Inspections. Approvals.
Call it whatever the fuck you want.
When you prevent doctors from getting the equipment and medicines they need to treat their patients, people who could have lived, die.
Fathers. Mothers. Grandparents. Children. Babies.
Human beings.
I keep thinking about those stents.
They existed. They had been found. Someone was willing to carry them. Doctors inside Gaza were waiting to use them.
Our uncle survived long enough.
Someone’s aunt did not.
And she is not an isolated tragedy. Thousands of sick and injured Palestinians are trapped inside Gaza, many with illnesses and injuries that could be treated if doctors had the medicines, equipment and supplies they needed.
This is not simply a humanitarian crisis that happened. It is the foreseeable consequence of denying a population access to medical care.
Israel continues to decide what medical supplies and equipment are allowed into Gaza, what is delayed, what is rejected. And the international community continues to accept a system in which desperately needed medical supplies can sit on the other side of a border while the people waiting for them die.
Beyond all the language of security, coordination, inspections and border procedures, sometimes it is nothing more complicated than this:
The medicine exists.
The equipment exists.
The doctors exist.
The patient is still alive.
And between them is a border.
Our uncle’s stent made it across in time.
Her stents did not.
Liz.
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