I entered Gaza the 12th of January 2009 late in the evening with a group of doctors. It was my first time entering an active war zone and I was feeling kind of nervous.

The feeling of anxiety worsened as a sound of bomb dropping near the bus made us all in the “Gaza city” bus that is transferring people from Egyptian to Palestinian border fall under our seats.

The distance from the border of Rafa to the center of town is very small. By the time we arrived in the hospital, ambulances with the wounded people from the bomb that had dropped in the main market started arriving. The Greek and French doctors went directly to work. The feeling of human loss is unbearable. When the rush is over, your mind starts thinking of what the eyes have seen. Images of children, women, old people, young boys in blood, missing parts of their body, with crazy eyes come back but are rejected by the filter of logic. I think the human mind has the capacity of forgetting horror images such as these as it can’t bear them.

And then comes fear as sound of dropping bombs wake you up at night. After a while you get used to it, people were saying.

You actually do but only superficially.

You just learn to get back to sleep even thought anything can happen anywhere and there is no safe place to hide.