The Electronic Intifada 4 July 2025
A paramedic attends to a wounded man after a bombing in Gaza City on 31 October 2024.
APA imagesOn 10 August last year, Israeli forces unleashed a relentless bombardment on Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza Strip where I live, forcing panicked families to escape for their lives.
My father was climbing the stairs from the first floor to the second when a heavy airstrike levelled a nearby house.
Shrapnel tore through the air. Gunpowder and dust clouded my vision. In the stairwell, the steps crumbled beneath my father.
I was with the rest of my family, sheltering on the first floor. I couldn’t reach him.
Then, as if out of nowhere, a young man climbed the collapsed stairwell, pressed a damp gauze to my father’s face, and carried him down to safety.
He moved with skill and calm. It was clear that he was experienced even if he wasn’t in any uniform to mark him out as an emergency responder.
Yousef Raed, 28 – who did not want to give his real name for fear that he and his family might become targets for Israel – had in fact been a volunteer paramedic with the Red Crescent since 2012, when he was just 14. He was one of the youngest volunteers in the history of the Red Crescent, he later told me proudly.
He and his wife and child had been displaced from Jabaliya, in Gaza’s north, to our area, and though not on duty, Yousef had no second thought about coming to my father’s rescue.
It was in our damaged home that I sat down with him and his wife, Khuloud, 30, in March to talk about their experience of Israel’s genocide and in particular his life as a volunteer paramedic. It was an emotional conversation.
Family service
Yousef comes from a family rooted in service, he told me. His father was a civil defence worker while two of his uncles were paramedics. One uncle was killed in October 2023 while on duty, the other was killed inside Kamal Adwan Hospital in December 2023.
Yousef’s father was also killed while on duty, just before the short-lived truce that began on 19 January this year.
These were not his first personal losses. He had already buried three fellow medics, who were also his friends, on 11 October 2023.
“I collected bits and pieces [of their bodies] in plastic bags. These were the colleagues I used to share my morning tea with,” Yousef recounted.
It wasn’t the most horrific thing he’d seen, he said, but it is the one he can’t forget.
“The image of their bodies torn apart still haunts me in nightmares.”
Aside from finding people alive, finding corpses intact provided some relief for Yousef, he said: at least families could bury their loved ones with some dignity.
Medical professional and emergency responders like Yousef have been particularly affected over the duration of Israell’s genocide in Gaza. At least 1,400 have been killed, while 360 are detained.
On 21 December 2023, while working at the Red Crescent’s headquarters in Jabalia – which was doubling as both a medical center and refuge for displaced people – Yousef was detained by Israeli troops along with dozens of others, including colleagues and displaced civilians.
Detention
Blindfolded and handcuffed, he was transferred to the infamous Sde Teiman detention camp, described as a “torture camp” by rights groups.
“They threatened to kill me constantly,” Yousef said. “They even accused me of being a Houthi fighter. I kept pleading – ‘I’m just a civilian, a first responder’ – but they didn’t care.”
He said four soldiers then beat him up. Yousef, who has chronic asthma, pleaded with the soldiers to stop.
“I started vomiting blood and gasping hard,” Yousef recounted, which, he said, only made them laugh.
During one interrogation, in early January, a soldier asked for his home address. Yousef, naively, told the soldier.
Hours later, the soldier told him – which turned out to be true – that they had bombed his house in Jabaliya where his wife, toddler son and other relatives had been sheltering until the Israeli military ordered people to evacuate the north.
“I broke down, begging to know if my family had survived. They just laughed: ‘We will kill everyone in Gaza’,” he said they told him.
In another interrogation, they showed him a photo of his wife and son.
“If you don’t give us what we want, we’ll kill them,” he said they told him. “One click – that’s all.”
He kept telling them that he was just a first responder and that he didn’t have the information they were looking for, which, he said, was the location of Israeli captives in Gaza or of members of Hamas.
Each day in captivity brought new torments: As with the testimony of many others, Yousef said he was variously attacked by dogs, given electric shocks, bound in stress positions, beaten with heavy tools, denied food, blankets, sleep, medical treatment – denied even the dignity of a toilet.
“Frost clung to my bones. I lost all feeling in my limbs,” he said.
In January 2024, Yousef was released at Karam Abu Salem crossing border.
“Run,” Yousef said he was told. “Run. If you stop, we’ll shoot you.”
Impossible choice
The first thing he did was call his brother, Abdullah, who informed Yousef that their mother and four other siblings had fled to Rafah, while Yousef’s wife, son and father remained trapped in the north.
But when Yousef was first reunited with his relatives in Rafah, he said, he couldn’t recognize them at first.
“My brother helped me recall their names. But my mind – it was blank, like someone had erased my memories.”
His wife, Kholoud, 30, meanwhile, had learned of Yousef’s release, but now faced an impossible choice.
“Either I flee south with my son through the death corridor of Netzarim, or I go alone, risking my own life, and leave my son behind.”
Kholoud chose to venture south, and left Raed, just 2, with her mother.
“I realised how precarious the decision I took was, but I had to make a sacrifice. I was catching my breath all along the way, knowing that any moment might be my last,” Kholoud told The Electronic Intifada.
In February 2024, she reached Rafah to reunite with her husband.
“It was bittersweet,” Yousef said. “I’d missed her so much, and longed for the day we would reunite. Yet, my thoughts were with my son Raed in the north.”
Displaced again
In May that year, when the Israeli military invaded Rafah, Yousef and his wife were displaced again, this time to the tent near my home in Nuseirat.
Yousef bonded with three of my brothers; Moataz, Montaser and Muhammad, and we all got to know each other. Yousef’s family and mine bonded over shared stories, anxieties and our hopes for a ceasefire.
His wife Kholoud cooked and shared food generously, though she confessed to us that she couldn’t enjoy eating while her son remained starving in the north.
The absence of their son was a constant worry for Yousef and Kholoud.
Yousef regularly called humanitarian organisations to ask them to help evacuate Raed, but little help was forthcoming. The fear that the separation might become permanent grew, especially after Israel declared a large section of al-Rashid street – which runs along Gaza’s coast – off limits in June 2024.
Kholoud tried to speak to her son every day.
“Sometimes the internet was gone. Other times, they were fleeing airstrikes. Most calls failed. My biggest fear was never hearing him say ‘mama’ again, never holding him or getting to stroke his hair,” Kholoud told The Electronic Intifada.
At last, Yousef got through to UNICEF. They agreed to help but made him sign a waiver that if harm befell his son on the journey, UNICEF bore no responsibility.
“I couldn’t die in the south without seeing him,” Yousef said. “And I couldn’t let him die in the north without seeing me.”
Reunion
In October 2024, Raed was finally reunited with his father in Deir al-Balah, where Yousef picked him up.
But the toddler didn’t recognize his father, and when he saw him, he wept uncontrollably.
“Since 7 October 2023, I haven’t spent much time with him,” said Yousef. “I missed the first walk, the first words, the weaning. I missed everything.”
Raed also didn’t recognize his mother and for a month, we heard Raed cry every night in the tent where they were staying near our house.
And then one day, Yousef joyfully informed us that Raed had said the words, “Mama” and “Baba.”
On 27 January, after a ceasefire came into effect, Yousef and his family returned north to their home in Jabaliya.
It was not a happy return, he told me when he, Khuloud and Raed returned briefly to Nuseirat in March before Israel broke the ceasefire, and we sat down to talk.
“The pollution. The sewage. The unexploded ordnance. The rubble. And now, tension between people. I fear for my son.”
He is obsessed with protecting Raed, who has suffered from malnutrition and whose immune system is fragile.
“He’s not allowed to leave the tent. One scrape could mean evacuation. And I will not live through that humiliation again. I just want him safe.”
Yousef himself now exhibits symptoms of post-traumatic stress syndrome, a common affliction for those exposed to extreme trauma, torture and mental torment, as he has been.
“When I see a bed, I see scattered limbs,” Yousef told The Electronic Intifada. “I hate the dark. I can’t sleep without noise. I see my wife’s face mutilated. I wake, gasping, clinging to my son.”
To make a little money, he has opened a small solar panel charging station in Jabaliya, where he and his family are determined to stay.
Yousef proved a lifeline for my father, as he and those like him have been for so many others.
His quick thinking and training saved my father from lethal danger. My father had passed out, and suffered shrapnel wounds, but it could have been much worse if Yousef had not pressed the damp gauze against his face and kept his airways open.
The bond between my father and Yousef remains untouched by the distance now dividing them.
Yousef has endured the unimaginable, yet he never lost his humanity nor the instinct to save others.
Hend Abo Helow is a medical student, researcher and writer based in Gaza.
