Photo courtesy of Steve Sosobee
Dr. Syed Sayeed, a plastic surgeon practicing on Long Island, met Steve Sosobee while working in a hospital in Gaza last summer. Sayeed had been working with a 3-year-old girl whose body — at least 20 to 30% of it — was covered in burns. Her family was displaced due to a bomb strike, Sayeed said. She needed medical care immediately, and the state of health care in Gaza was bleak; the few hospitals still operating lacked adequate resources, and in the midst of a famine, there simply wasn’t enough food to keep her healthy enough to recover.
“One of the doctors I met in Gaza was from the United States,” Sayeed said. “He actually had a joint venture with HEAL Palestine to enter Gaza. And he said, you know… reach out to Steve Sosobee, and, ‘If anyone can get the child out of Gaza, Steve will be able to do it.’”
Sosobee co-founded HEAL Palestine — HEAL being an acronym for health, education, aid and leadership — in January 2024. The organization is a non-profit that provides aid to Palestinian refugees in the United States and in Gaza. He started the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund (PCRF) 30 years ago as well, but when the organization’s board no longer reflected his values, he left and created HEAL.
“Using my own connections and some of Steve’s connections, we were able to get the child accepted to Boston Shriners’ Hospital for burn care, and they were able to get the child a passport from the West Bank,” Sayeed said. “A few days before she was going to be transferred out, I actually had to leave — I was pulled out because there was a plan for an attack on the Rafah border. And then two days before she was going to leave, the Rafah border was overtaken, and the possibility of her leaving was gone, and that’s when she died.”
There are more stories like the girl’s. More cases than Sosobee can take on — but HEAL is taking things one step at a time.
Nearly half the population of Gaza is under the age of 18. In the approximately 25-mile strip of land that makes up the territory, more than 50,000 people have been killed, the Palestinian Health Ministry reported in March. A study published in The Lancet in July estimated that the death toll could exceed 186,000 when accounting for “indirect” deaths. These include deaths that occurred as a result of the bombings of Gazan hospitals, deaths by starvation due to the Israeli blockade of aid and food into the region, as well as people who are considered missing (as opposed to dead) and are buried under rubble.
In Gaza, there are 16 at least partially-functioning hospitals with a total of 1,822 hospital beds as of January 2025, according to the World Health Organization. In Nassau County, for reference, there are 13 hospitals and more than 5,600 hospital beds. The population of the Gaza Strip is nearly twice that of Nassau County.
Sayeed spent the spring in Gaza, primarily helping people who were suffering from burn injuries as a result of Israeli air strikes. He went to the West Bank, and then to Jordan to try to enter Gaza again. Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) wouldn’t allow him in, he said.
“They don’t really give reasons why they don’t allow people in,” Sayeed said. Foreign doctors of Palestinian descent are not allowed in. This includes any person whose parents or grandparents were born in or lived in Palestine, whether or not they had a Palestinian ID.
Sayeed said the IDF allowed him to bring medical supplies during his first trip to Gaza, but nothing more than one bag for personal items and one bag for food on the second trip. Along with the other doctors, he stayed in a safe house, which is considered “de-conflicted.” He still woke up to the sounds of bombs nearby.
Sayeed recalled a moment in which he went up to the roof of the safe house. Below him, for miles, all he could see were tents. In them were thousands of displaced Palestinian families seeking refuge. When the sun set, they were left in complete darkness; Israel cut off electricity into Gaza soon after Oct. 7, 2023. Occasionally, a small light would peek through — usually a cell phone light or flashlight powered by a generator or a solar panel.
During the day, he would drive to the hospital campus, which was surrounded by makeshift shelters of sheets and strings. People had set up stations outside: barber shops, tailoring shops to sew up tattered clothes, cell phone charging ports connected to car batteries.
“Everyone is trying to seek shelter, but also trying to live their life the best that they could in those circumstances,” Sayeed said. Minimal aid is flowing into Gaza, and when the Biden administration gave the Israeli government a deadline to begin sending more or risk losing their arms transfers in 2024, Israel didn’t meet it. Earlier this month, a ship carrying aid into Gaza was hit by drone strikes. Activist groups accused Israel of the strikes, but the Israeli government has not yet commented on the matter. No consequences were issued after Israel missed the aid deadline and the country remains the largest recipient of American aid since World War II.
Inside the hospital, the deprivation was especially hard to work around. Given the shortage of medical supplies faced by the doctors — both Gazan natives and foreigners there on aid missions — treating patients sometimes meant abandoning standard medical practice.
With displaced people living in the hallways of the hospital, it was hard to keep things sanitary, Sayeed said.
“You can just imagine thousands and thousands of people using these facilities on a regular basis… and in the operating room itself, the supplies are lacking. There are flies because sanitary conditions are poor. So operating on patients, you’d have flies landing on them. Some of the patients would have maggots growing out of their wounds, because the flies would lay eggs.”
Most of the patients were women and children, Sayeed said. The United Nations’ Human Rights Office reported in November that nearly 70% of the fatalities of the war on Gaza were women and children.
Even for those who do receive adequate medical care, recovering from their injuries is made harder by the lack of food in Gaza.
“They don’t have adequate nutrition. There’s no access to regular quality food and protein. So they may be getting aid of rice and flour and these things, but it’s not what the human body needs to heal these large wounds.”
Quality over quantity
The situation in Gaza is catastrophic, which is why HEAL takes a qualitative approach over a quantitative one.
“I’m looking for qualitative work in which we can identify ways that we can save the lives of kids,” Sosobee said. The process of getting a child out of Gaza and into the U.S. is extensive, and costly, so the in-depth focus on each case is necessary.
“You have to submit their names to an evacuation list, which, in the case of an American organization, the state department will then submit it to the Israelis on our behalf. And that gets approved or not approved,” Sosobee explained. “So first you have to obviously arrange the care for them. And once they get the care arranged, then you submit their case for treatment abroad, and hopefully we can get them out depending on the U.S.’ ability to push them, and then the Israelis’ approval. At the end of the day, the Israelis have full approval.”
Sosobee said they have dozens of children waiting to get approval to be sent to the U.S. for medical care. Through their work, though, HEAL has already transformed and even saved lives. As a grassroots organization, HEAL has over 30,000 donors.
“Not a few wealthy ones, but people from all backgrounds,” Sosobee said of HEAL’s donors.
With the money they’ve raised, they saved 18-year-old Sara Bseiso’s life. Bseiso grew up in the neighborhood of Rimal in Gaza.
“My life before the war was normal… I lived in a cozy house with my family — four sisters and four brothers,” Bseiso said at “Voices from Gaza and the West Bank: Healthcare in Crisis,” an event held at Stony Brook University on Sept. 19, 2024.
Bseiso lost two of her brothers to an air strike on her home: 15-year-old Ahmed, and 8-year-old Mohammed. She was severely burned on her face and body and remained in the bombed remnants of her home for 90 days without proper medical care. Bseiso moved to an out-of-service hospital, and then began her trek south until she reached the Rafah border, where she was evacuated to the U.S. and spent three months in the intensive care unit at Northwell Health.
“We arranged a medical evacuation flight for $180,000… we saved her life with the thanks to the doctors in the hospital. Of course, all [of HEAL’s evacuees] deserve all the recognition and appreciation, but it was that kind of work that really, for me, symbolizes the kind of organization I want to work on,” Sosobee said.
Ahmed, an English and Arabic translator for HEAL who requested she be referred to by her last name over privacy concerns, said “[Sara’s] the first kid to be here — not kid, because she hates the word kid. She was only the first patient to the U.S.”
Ahmed, who is from Gaza but currently resides in the U.S., said she feels connected to every patient she works with.
“Whenever we provide support and treatment for such kids, it makes me feel that I’m giving back, I’m helping my people,” Ahmed said. “I’m not — I felt hopeless, like by the time the war started, but I decided to put all my energy just to give back and to help my people and support them.”
“I guess this makes my life easier these days,” she added.
HEAL brought a brother and a sister to Philadelphia for medical care, and Ahmed followed up with every step of the case. At first, the doctors said they would have to amputate the brother’s leg. After several surgeries, they decided they could save it.
“Whenever we have this success story for one of our kids, or we have another solution that is less harmful for the family… it makes my heart feel so happy that they’re getting the right treatment in the right place,” Ahmed said.
Working on these cases can be emotionally draining, she noted, but it brings her more peace than doing nothing would. For those on the ground in the Gaza Strip, the job is life-threatening: In September, HEAL program manager Islam Hijazy was shot and killed, and in October, teacher and journalist Omar Al Balawi was also fatally shot.
Sayeed said his time in Gaza was difficult — but more than anything, he felt an urge to go back once he had left. He returned to Gaza in December.
“I think it’s just, you develop these personal connections to the people that you meet there, whether they’re healthcare providers or people in the communities that we cross paths with and made friends with, and we still stay in touch with,” he said.
Sayeed stressed the collective responsibility of people to contribute to aid in Palestine.
“First, put it in your mind, and put it in your heart. Second, put it in your words and in your action,” he said at the “Voices from Gaza” event.
“We have a moral responsibility to care for these children and to get them back on track for as much as they can have a normal life when they’ve lost limbs or been burned. These are all factors that students in Stony Brook and everywhere around the country and around the world need to be aware and take action on, that we can’t stay silent,” Sosobee said.
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