In April, 18 hours through a trauma shift, I received a text from my father in our family group chat. My cousin had been injured, he said. “Pray for him.”

I was almost two years into my surgery-residency training, and I had received a message like this, about my family in Lebanon, once before. It was a year and a half prior and just one line: “Nana and her son are martyrs.” That day, September 23, 2024, marked one of the deadliest days in southern Lebanon’s history — 500 people killed in a matter of hours.

After the text from my father, while chart-checking a patient in the emergency department, I called my mother for more information. I didn’t want to burden my father with questions. I imagined he, as an older sibling in a family of 14 children and a surgeon himself, was fielding the stresses of so many people already. She told me my cousin was alive but in critical condition. Israel had bombed his home, and the blast had torn off part of his face. Later, I would learn that his skull was exposed; his mother had not been able to recognize him except for his pajamas. He was in the hospital now, intubated, deeply sedated such that his brain function could not be assessed, and nursing multiple long-bone fractures. My cousin was a medical student, almost ready to be a doctor. Now we weren’t sure if he would survive.

After checking on a patient, I went back to my call room and sent an audio message to a friend, telling him what had happened. He said I should ask to go home. At first, I said no, I was fine, we were having a busy night — a couple of trauma activations already — and I didn’t want to burden my co-residents with extra work by leaving them. He insisted, and I replayed my initial audio message to listen for what he heard in my voice. An unsteadiness. And then, I started crying and could not stop.

It was not because of my cousin — or not just him. Every day, people were injured and killed, and just because we did not share blood did not make theirs any less precious. I think it was a sudden awareness, one I tried most of the time to keep out of consciousness, of the worlds between what I was doing and what needed to be done or what I wanted to do. That night, I couldn’t suppress the thought: What am I doing here? Moments like my cousin’s injury, my other cousins’ deaths before that, made it impossible to suppress the dissonance requisite to life in America.

My father called soon after. I answered and he said, “Habibti,” like he should be the one comforting me. He is the most stabilizing presence I know, a quality you want in a surgeon and a way he learned to be before medical school as a response to the circumstances of his childhood after his family survived the Nakba. I asked him what he knew, and he shared details with me that he couldn’t, he confided, with others, because of how medicine makes us less reactive or how it teaches us to appraise a difficult reality head-on by giving us a language that takes the person out of things. He presented my cousin’s injuries and clinical status, what he’d gathered so far, as facts. Intellectualization, I’ve heard people call it, although it doesn’t feel like coping but necessity: Someone has to find a way to see straight.

The medical jargon my father used to describe what in human terms amounted to the end of a life as we knew it had a sobering effect. Still, I asked him if I should request to be excused from the last eight hours of the shift and come home that night. I insisted I could handle the remainder of my work, but I wasn’t sure if I should want to. If not now, at what point would life beyond medicine take priority? I wanted his permission to breathe — or, rather, to feel — I think because his threshold for stepping away was high; he never took days off. He answered that if I could leave, I should. I texted my senior resident something brief, explaining the situation without naming the cause of injury: Israel. My senior called me and said, with a degree of care that is rare in surgery, “Please, go home and be with your family.”

A month before my cousin’s injury, in March, Hezbollah launched rockets at Israel in response to many months of cease-fire violations by Israel, and following the American-Israeli strikes against Iran. Israel’s subsequent attacks against Lebanon have killed over 4,000 and wounded thousands of others. In recent months, over 1 million people have been displaced in response to Israel’s blanket “evacuation” orders as it works to ethnically cleanse the South. Any health-care system would struggle under this pressure. But in Lebanon, as in Gaza, medical workers are themselves targets. Since March 2, the World Health Organization has documented attacks that killed 135 health-care workers and injured 405 more. What would it mean to be a doctor there instead of here?

Two weeks after receiving that text from my father, I boarded a flight to Beirut. I’d come to the country in part because I couldn’t bear to be away anymore, in part to do work as a reporter, and in part to see my family. A cease-fire had just been announced, one no one I knew expected to last. Lebanon had been a sticking point in the ongoing negotiations between the United States and Iran around an end to hostilities. Moreover, Israel was not known to respect cease-fires in general. Over the 12 months that followed a cease-fire in November 2024, the United Nations recorded more than 10,000 violations committed by Israel against Lebanon, including the regular killing of Lebanese civilians. As in Gaza — after a cease-fire there went into effect — Israel took advantage of the relative calm in Lebanon to advance and occupy territory it had previously been........

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