NJ doctor who'd been trapped in Gaza evacuates, pharmacist is now home

A New Jersey doctor who remained at a hospital near Rafah even as some American members of his medical mission evacuated late last week is now safely out of Gaza, according to family members and the group that organized the mission.

The Palestinian American Medical Association said on Tuesday that all 14 remaining members of its 19-member mission — a group that included Americans as well as medical professionals from other countries — exited Gaza with help from Jordanian officials. That included Dr. Adam Hamawy, a plastic surgeon with offices in Princeton and Woodland Park, Hamawy’s brother-in-law, Nidal Hozien, confirmed to Gothamist.

Hamawy’s trip out of Gaza comes days after pharmacist Ghada Abukuwaik of Totowa, one of five Americans with the group, was evacuated late last week with the aid of the U.S. Embassy in Israel. She returned to the United States on Monday. Only Americans were allowed to depart Gaza through those arrangements, Abukuwaik told Gothamist.

The U.S.-based nonprofit FAJR Scientific said Monday that its own team stationed at the hospital was also safely returning home.

The Palestinian American Medical Association team began its mission at the European Hospital in Khan Younis May 1 and expected to leave May 13, but became temporarily trapped in Gaza amid the ongoing closure of the Rafah border crossing.

Hozien said on Tuesday afternoon that he had been unable to reach his brother-in-law for the past several hours because of the lack of cell service, but said that he and other members of the group were “all ecstatic, all happy.”

Hozien thanked the Jordanian government, which he said was “instrumental” in evacuating the remaining 14 medical professionals. Hamawy was one of three American medical professionals from the team who chose to stay in Gaza last week. He’d said in a statement he’d been unwilling to leave Gaza while other members of the team remained unable to evacuate: “I could not in good conscience leave my team behind.”

“That was a major thing for them,” Hozien said. “Everybody that came in with us exits with us.”

Hozien said Hamawy told him another 12 replacement medical personnel waiting on the Egyptian border are yet to be allowed into Gaza. He said his brother-in-law and the other departing team members are “very concerned that the hospital is going to be left without doctors for a day or two.”

A difficult decision to leave

Abukuwaik, the Totowa pharmacist, spoke with Gothamist from JFK Airport on Monday afternoon as she returned to the United States. Abukuwaik said the decision to leave Gaza with some of the other Americans last week was a difficult one, made with deep reservations. She said she was reluctant to abandon her Gazan patients and team members from other countries who weren’t being guaranteed safe passage at the time.

Abukuwaik said she had initially requested to stay at the hospital after learning she could evacuate on Friday. She said patients there had told her, “We feel safe when we see you. The moment you leave, that means we're going to be killed.”

“Just imagine that someone is looking at you because you are the hope for them to stay alive, and then you have to leave,” she said.

But she said the mission director told her, “You have kids, you have family … and we cannot keep all of you here. The U.S. did a lot to let you leave safely. We have to respect that.”

For weeks, the team treated Gazans for ailments as well as for injuries sustained from what Abukuwaik described as nearly constant bombing of the area.

Abukuwaik said the European Hospital was only working at “30% capacity." She added that her group included doctors and other medical professionals from California, Oregon and Texas, as well as countries including Australia and Egypt.

Abukuwaik said she was glad to be able to return to her family and work, but added, “I'm so upset and I'm heartbroken of how this happened."

"We went all together as a team and we should exit as a team,” she said.

She said that during her trip she was responsible for setting up a pharmacy that provided health care workers at the European Hospital with supplies and medicine. “It was huge, it took me a few days,” she said.

Abukuwaik said her daily routine consisted of visiting the different parts of the hospital, such as the emergency room, intensive care unit and operating room, to check with doctors and patients on what medication and supplies they wanted. “Most of what they needed was out of stock,” she said.

She noted that the only medicine and supplies in the hospital's possession have come from the health care missions in the region. She said her group brought "300 suitcases" of medical supplies and that local health providers had “nothing.”

“Who's going to give it to them?" she said. "There's no infrastructure in the country. It's a kind of a ghost country."

‘A resilience we don’t have’

Abukuwaik said that even with those supplies, 80% of the time the doctors did not have exactly what they needed to treat their patients properly. For example, she said, amputee patients were being treated with Tylenol, since the doctors in the missions were not able to transport narcotic painkillers with them.

“Just imagine people coming to you with amputation, and the OR room doing the operations, and they have no kind of pain relief,” she said.

Abukuwaik said she observed a resilience in the people of Gaza that that she had never seen before. She recalled treating people with wounds and exposed bones, and said they were “not even screaming.”

“They have a resilience we don’t have," the pharmacist said. "They have something we don't have. We are all human beings. We have the same, you know, criteria as a human being, but no, they have something different than us."

Abukuwaik added that she wanted to say “thank you” to everyone who worked to get her home safely. But she reiterated that medical professionals to replace her team needed to be allowed to enter Gaza. She also called for a cease-fire in the war between Israel and Hamas.

Abukuwaik is CEO of CureMed pharmacies in New Jersey and a mother of six kids. She said that before she left the United States, her youngest son, who is 6, told her he did not want her to go.

“He was very upset,” she said.

When she sees her son, she continued, she planned to “give him a big hug and I will tell him I [have] come back safe.”

This story has been updated to reflect news of Dr. Adam Hamawy and other members of the Palestinian American Medical Association's mission departing Gaza.