(NewsNation) — Almost all of the American doctors who had been stuck in Gaza amid a total military siege by Israel of the Rafah crossing have been evacuated, the White House said Friday.
Seventeen out of the 20 American medical professionals who were in Gaza have left the besieged enclave, John Kirby, President Joe Biden’s national security spokesman, said in a news briefing.
“They came out today,” he said. “All 17 that wanted to leave. I won’t speak for the other three, but I can assure you that any of them that wanted to leave are out now.”
Dr. Mohamad Abdelfattah and Dr. Mahmoud Sabha, who went to Gaza on May 1 as part of a medical mission at the European Hospital with the Palestinian American Medical Association, confirmed to NewsNation Friday afternoon that they were among the evacuees.
Of the eight Americans in their group, five evacuated, while three chose to stay back, Abdelfattah said over text message. The members of their medical envoy who were not American were not allowed to leave, he said.
“It was very difficult to leave our colleagues behind and unfair that they made us do this. PAMA and Fajer are American companies, and every member that entered with them should’ve been evacuated together,” Abdelfattah said.
More than a dozen American doctors, nurses, and other health care workers went to Gaza as part of a medical mission. The group was scheduled to leave Rafah on Monday so another mission could take over the aid work but were told there was no safe route to exit the besieged strip after Israeli troops seized control of Gaza’s Rafah border crossing last week.
Among the three American doctors who chose Friday to stay in Gaza to continue medical care was Dr. Adam Hamawy, a New Jersey-based plastic surgeon whom Sen. Tammy Duckworth credits with saving her life in Iraq in 2004.
Hamawy told NewsNation on Wednesday that the situation unfolding in Gaza is more horrific than any war he’s ever witnessed.
“This is not a war. This is such a complete eradication of everything,” he said.
Abdelfattah said the Palestinian American Medical Association had another medical envoy waiting in Egypt on standby to take the team’s place once they safely exited, but that mission has been canceled.
Hamawy told NewsNation earlier that if the envoy wasn’t able to relieve them, his group would have to decide whether to leave or stay.
“That would be a very hard decision that I hope we don’t have to make,” he said.
Hamawy was an Army surgeon assigned to a combat support hospital in Iraq in 2004 and treated Duckworth, a Democrat from Illinois, an Army helicopter pilot whose Black Hawk was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. She lost her legs and partial use of her arms in the attack.
“One of the surgeons who helped save my life, Adam Hamawy, described my leg injuries to me years later as ‘mud and blood, that’s all there was,’” Duckworth wrote in Chicago Magazine.
The Rafah crossing into Egypt has been closed since Israeli troops seized it a week ago. Israel gained full control over the entry and exit of people and goods for the first time since it withdrew soldiers and settlers from Gaza in 2005, though it has long maintained a blockade of the coastal enclave in cooperation with Egypt.
No food has reportedly entered the two main border crossings in southern Gaza for the past week, the New York Times reported. It is a region that had been sheltering 1.3 million Palestinians, many of whom have fled since Israel took control of the crossing.
The exodus of Palestinians from Gaza’s last refuge accelerated this week as Israeli forces pushed deeper into the southern city of Rafah.
Some 300,000 of the more than 1 million civilians sheltering there had fled the city by Monday following evacuation orders from Israel, which said it must invade to dismantle Hamas and return hostages taken from Israel in the Oct. 7 attack.
