MSF Lebanon: "People are still dying. People are still getting injured."

04 September 2026 - Despite the reduction in the intensity of hostilities and repeated announcements of ceasefires and de-escalation efforts, the situation in southern Lebanon remains fragile. Israeli military operations and insecurity continue to affect communities, with people still being killed and injured and many families unable to return to normal life. In areas such as Nabatiyeh, which experienced extensive destruction during the conflict, communities continue to live with the consequences of war while trying to recover and rebuild.

Dr. Aqsa Durrani, physician, epidemiologist and Board President of MSF USA, has extensive frontline experience responding to conflict and emergencies, including in Gaza, Afghanistan and Sierra Leone. She spent six weeks at Al Najdeh Hospital in Nabatiyeh during the recent escalation, where she treated severely injured patients and witnessed attacks affecting civilians and emergency responders.

Transcript of interview with Dr. Durrani

"My name is Dr. Aqsa Durrani, and for the past six weeks, I've been working in Najdeh Hospital in Nabatiyeh southern Lebanon. Earlier this week, we received two injured patients due to a drone strike nearby. They were brought in by an ambulance, and our understanding was that the ambulance that brought them was the second ambulance that tried to reach them, and the first ambulance was actually struck and were not able to reach the patients themselves.

So when the second ambulance was able to reach them, they brought a father and son into the emergency, and I understand from the family that they were going to their home to collect some things to try to adjust to life outside of their home and in the area where they are displaced, and when they reached near their home, they saw a rock in the road. The son got out to move the rock, and as the son was moving the rock, there was an attack on the car, and the father was severely injured. When the father was brought into the emergency room, he was already critically ill, had several injuries on his head, and was just covered in blood.

We immediately resuscitated him, intubated him, and then he went to our ICU. Unfortunately, he later died that day, and while his son escaped from many physical injuries, he did experience the trauma of witnessing the entire attack, including all of the injuries on his father. A few weeks into my time in southern Lebanon, we received two injured paramedics in the emergency room, and it was remarkable to me how the community mobilized around them, and this is because we, MSF, has seen systematic targeting of paramedics, and so the community has as well, and every time there is an attack on paramedics, there is just an outpouring of support for them because they are risking their lives in order to go and rescue members of their community, and continue to do it despite the very clear danger to them as we have seen them systematically targeted, and all rescue teams and paramedical services should be protected under international law, they should be protected as healthcare workers trying to promote the health and safety of their community members, the systematic targeting that we have witnessed is clearly a violation of humanitarian health norms across the world.

So, when I was reviewing war-wounded cases that we received during May and June of this year during the height of some of the escalations, I saw CT scans with injuries with multi-compartment shrapnel, large shrapnel, shrapnel in the eye, in the head, so intracranial shrapnel, and also tiny fragment shrapnel, and all of these are consistent with use of different types of advanced weapons, but often as I was reviewing the files, I would also see multiple members of the same family coming in with severe, severe, severe injuries, including children. The patterns of injury that I saw, despite having worked in many conflict areas around the world, I think have been some of the most severe, particularly shrapnel-based injuries and blast injuries that I have seen, and this was something that really just struck me as I was reviewing the imaging of the patients that were received during that May and June period. ​

Everyone around us had a story of loss and pain and trauma, and one of our colleagues that really struck me the most is one of the supervisors in the nursing department who was always just the most upbeat and just strong leader that the nursing team had, and she would constantly be trying to lift everybody up, ensure that we were all delivering care the way that we should deliver care to patients, and I just found out, you know, weeks after working with her, that she just became a single mom because her husband was killed in an Israeli attack, and she's now the single mother of two children and dealing silently with this pain as she's delivering care to her community, and it's just one of those things where, you know, the pain that everyone is going through, it's impossible for us to qualify it.

Every single person has a universe of love and loss that they are experiencing in every moment, and we are not able even to talk to them about everything that they're going through because we're trying to also deliver care to the community. And so it's just really, really, just for people to really understand that the attacks are continuing is something really important because I don't think enough people are talking about it. And people, as a result of that, people are still dying.

People are still getting injured. The community is not able to cope. They're not able to return to their normal lives.

They're not able to experience the joys of life that they should be able to be experiencing. And we cannot, you know, stand by and continue speaking about this as if it's a ceasefire when every day we are witnessing the exact opposite of that. "

ENDS