“It is right to be here”: Medical Coordinator Giorgio Monti on providing care in Gaza

EMERGENCY Medical Coordinator Giorgio Monti shares what our teams are seeing in Gaza, the care they provide every day and why EMERGENCY is working to build a lasting healthcare presence for the community.

Giorgio Monti has worked with EMERGENCY in Sudan, Afghanistan, the Central African Republic, Iraq and Sierra Leone. Since 2024, his work has also taken him to Gaza.

There, he has witnessed the impact of the conflict on nearly every aspect of daily life, from access to food and water to transport, education and healthcare.

“The healthcare system has been severely hit,” Giorgio says. For EMERGENCY’s teams, working in Gaza has also meant operating in an environment where they cannot assume that any place is safe.

We always repeat this to each other as a mantra: ‘There is no safe place in Gaza, there is no safe place in Gaza.’

Against this backdrop, EMERGENCY’s teams are working every day to provide free, high-quality healthcare to people who need it.

Providing care amid enormous need

At EMERGENCY’s clinic in Gaza, patients can access primary and emergency healthcare in a purpose-built facility designed to provide care in a clean, organised and appropriate clinical environment.

The clinic includes an emergency room where teams stabilise injured patients and people with acute medical needs, many of them children. Staff also carry out nutritional screenings, provide therapeutic food, work with UNICEF on prevention activities, and offer maternal and child healthcare, medicines and minor surgical procedures.

For Giorgio, the number of patients arriving at the clinic illustrates the scale of the need.

The numbers are staggering,” he says. “The A&E I come from at home is one of the largest in Italy, and that has about 200 people a day; in Gaza we have 250.”

Access to medicines for people living with chronic conditions remains another significant challenge. Even as other health facilities have closed, Giorgio says EMERGENCY’s team continues doing what it can to ensure patients receive treatment.

What keeps him returning to the work is straightforward.

What keeps me there is the fact that there is a need, the fact that we are able to help, the fact that we make a difference, and the fact that it is right.”

“It’s not that we are overly generous or merciful,” he continues. “It is just that it’s right to be there, and precisely because it is right, we want to stay there.”

The colleagues behind the clinic

For Giorgio, any account of EMERGENCY’s work in Gaza must also recognise the Gazan colleagues who make it possible.

At the time of his account, four international staff were working alongside 40 Gazan colleagues who kept the clinic operating.

They’re exceptional people; they’re very well-trained and very skilled, all highly motivated and very, very capable people,” Giorgio says.

They are also living through the same conditions affecting the patients they treat. Giorgio describes colleagues continuing to work while facing displacement and profound disruption in their own lives.

“They give us courage.”

Their role is central not only to the clinic’s work today, but to EMERGENCY’s longer-term vision for the project.

“We work for these young Gazan people so that this centre gradually becomes theirs,” Giorgio says. “That’s what we always try to do in our projects.”

Going beyond the immediate

When EMERGENCY first opened its clinic in Gaza, Giorgio recalls hearing the same concern repeatedly from people in the community: “But soon you will just leave.”

His response was to point to the clinic itself.

This clinic isn’t made of tents, it’s built and rooted into the ground. It is not leaving, and when we as international staff leave, it will be because you’ll be able to continue it on your own without needing our help.”

For Giorgio, responding to an immediate humanitarian crisis and thinking about what comes afterward cannot be separated.

“This is such an important objective,” he says, “to have projects that go beyond the immediate.”

That approach has long been central to EMERGENCY’s work: responding to urgent medical needs while investing in people, facilities and healthcare services designed to remain rooted in the communities they serve.

In Gaza, amid extraordinary pressure on patients and healthcare workers alike, that means continuing to provide care today while working toward something that can endure.

Support EMERGENCY’s work

For Giorgio, none of this work happens in isolation. It depends on the medical professionals working inside EMERGENCY’s facilities, the local colleagues sustaining them and the people around the world who choose to support their work.

“So many people ask me how they can help,” he says. “We need those who give money, who volunteer, who raise awareness of what we do. This is so important.”

Your donation helps make it possible for EMERGENCY’s teams to continue providing free, high-quality healthcare in Gaza, while sustaining our medical work in countries affected by war and poverty around the world.