Mads Gilbert
Night in Gaza

«This book is one way of passing on my experiences of life in Gaza for fifteen days in July 2014. It is the photo story you will not see on television or in the newspapers. With a small, black camera ready in the pocket of my green operating scrubs, and with permission from the hospital management, I was able to take photographs freely, but naturally within normal ethical limits. What I experienced was awful, and it was immense. The sounds of bombs and screaming, bodies torn to pieces and a society reduced to rubble; but I also saw camaraderie, dignity, human courage and unflinching resolve. I had no choice. I had to write.» DR. MADS GILBERT
Summer 2014 the World witnessed a 4th attack on Gaza since 2006. The attack lasted 51 days. The Norwegian medical doctor Mads Gilbert has worked at the Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza during all four attacks. In July 2014 he decided to leave his work in Tromsø, North Norway and join his friends and colleagues at Al Shifa. While helping wounded patients, he carried a small camera in the pocket of his green coat. Through text and pictures he tells his personal story of 15 days and nights at the hospital under continuous bombing and human suffering. Dr. Gilbert is invited worldwide, to universities and many other fora to lecture on his experiences and views on the Palestinians’ situation.

Mads Gilbert

Øystein Hermstad

Mads Gilbert is the Medical Director of the Clinic of Emergency Medicine at the University Hospital of North Norway and a professor at the University of Tromsø (UiT), the Arctic University of Norway. In addition to his work in Norway, since the 1980s he has been heavily involved in medical solidarity work around the world, carrying out training programmes and helping war wounded patients in Burma, Angola, Afghanistan, Cambodia and Lebanon, among other places. Over the last fifteen years, his medical solidarity work has been mostly in Gaza, occupied Palestine. Gilbert has also been an active member of the Red Party (Rødt) and has served several terms as a councillor in the county of Troms. He has published a number of textbooks, and his book Eyes in Gaza, written together with Dr Erik Fosse, was translated into English in 2010. Gilbert was appointed a Commander of the Order of St Olav in 2013, in recognition of his international work and his services to emergency medicine in Norway.