I am a Palestinian-American emergency medicine physician from a small, laid-back town on the Atlantic Ocean on the East coast of Florida called Ormond Beach. Like a majority of Palestinians, I was born and raised in the diaspora of different countries, enduring various levels of suffering and discrimination in refugee camps, that my parents lived in after their displacement in the Nakba in 1948. At age 22, I finished my higher education in pharmacy from Jordan, then I finally managed to settle down in the United States where I got married to my beautiful wife and raised four amazing kids. At age thirty-five, I went back to school to fulfill my dream of becoming a physician and managed to specialize in emergency medicine. After my graduation, I had the privilege to work in many world-renowned hospitals, such as Cleveland Clinic. However, nothing was more honorable as the privilege of going back to the land of Palestine and serve my people when the war on Gaza started in 2024. I was torn with the gruesome scenes of daily mass casualties in the emergency department filled with burnt and dead infants, children, and women, and the unimaginable level of suffering and destruction with unforgettable screams, or sometimes watching them choking giving their last breath unable to perform basic resuscitations because of the lack of medical supplies and intensive care beds in the middle of
the world’s unconscionable silence. After I came back from my medical mission, I made a promise to never turn my back on my people and will stand by them to the end. I have therefore decided to come back breaking the siege.
Dhiaa Daoud MD