Hadeel Deeb is a medical researcher from the city of Sour in southern Lebanon. She founded the organization Medicide in 2025 to track the ongoing Israeli attacks on the country’s medical sector and to develop a curriculum for Lebanese medical students and researchers to learn about “war medicine,” a branch of healthcare focused on treating war-related injuries. Part of this curriculum involves archiving and understanding the long history of Zionist targeting of medical workers and centers in Lebanon and across the region.

According to Lebanon’s Ministry of Public Health, Israeli forces killed 408 healthcare workers between October 2023 and the November 2024 ceasefire. Most of those killed were members of the Islamic Health Authority (IHA), the largest paramedic organization operating in southern Lebanon. While affiliated with Hezbollah, the IHA is a humanitarian organization whose personnel and vehicles are protected under international law. Nevertheless, during the 2024 war — and again following the renewed Israeli assault that began on March 2, 2026 — the Israeli Occupation Forces declared all IHA vehicles legitimate targets. Since the escalation in early March 2026, Israeli attacks have killed more than 150 healthcare workers, including paramedics affiliated with the IHA, the Amal Movement’s Al-Risala Scouts, the Lebanese Red Cross, and the Lebanese Civil Defense.

The New York War Crimes collective sat down with Deeb in June in Beirut to discuss her research and her organization’s work. This interview has been translated from Arabic and edited for length and clarity.

When did your interest in war medicine begin?

Hadeel Deeb: My research professor in college studied heavy metal toxicity in war zones, particularly among American soldiers injured during the Iraq War. Many of these soldiers developed infections that did not respond to antibiotics. Researchers began investigating why and found that injuries caused by shrapnel and bombs often leave behind tiny fragments of metal that cannot be fully removed. They hypothesized that these retained fragments may provide surfaces where bacteria can persist, making some infections more difficult to treat and, in some cases, allowing them to recur years after the initial injury.

One of the questions that led me to this work is the question of shrapnel. The thing that was supposed to kill you remains inside you after you survive. Sometimes shrapnel cannot be fully removed, and it remains visible in the body of the injured person. What fascinates me is that a fragment can finally emerge 30 or 40 years later. For decades you live with it. You accept it and make peace with it. Then it leaves your body, and suddenly you remember what happened. The wound is reopened, in a sense.
This raised a larger question for me: how does war stay in the body of the injured even after the fighting ends?

Do you have an example from 2006?

Beyond the direct targeting of hospitals, doctors also encountered injuries caused by weapons they did not fully understand. When wounded people arrived at medical facilities, physicians were not always sure how to treat them. They began encountering unusual injuries — wounds with unfamiliar appearances, colors, and odors.

The medical teams started wondering what had caused these wounds. Were they the result of chemical agents? White phosphorus? Some other type of weapon they had not previously encountered? Investigating those questions became part of the medical response itself. Doctors had to learn not only how to treat the injured but also how to recognize and understand new forms of war-related trauma.

What does white phosphorus do to the body?

Many white phosphorus munitions are released through shelling: They burst in the sky and the chemicals fall from it like rain. So anyone below is at risk. The problem with it is that it continues burning as long as it is exposed to oxygen, so the wounds that come from it cannot be treated like traditional wounds. A normal patient — a burn patient for example — can be treated and stabilized in the ER. With white phosphorus, there are specific personal protective equipment for treatment such as uniforms that the nurse must wear because the phosphorus can be transferred from the patient to the nurse. They learned how to do this during the recent wars.

You have to ask: What is the Israelis’ military strategy? From there you can begin to understand the injury. In Gaza, we’ve seen horrific instances of amputations. What was the goal? For no fighter to continue fighting, or, in the case of child amputees, for no one to grow up and be capable of fighting. This was also the goal of the pagers attack — for these 4,000 men to lose their limbs and their sight and be unable to fight.

The connection between the wounded and their body after this transformation [the injury] is something that needs further research and understanding.

That’s a very powerful question. What are you finding?

I’ve found that there isn’t one relationship between the wounded person and the wound. Every person develops a different relationship to what happened to them and to the transformed body they must live with afterward.

I’ve sat with injured mothers who speak less about the injury itself than about how it affects their children, their family, and their neighbors. The wound extends outward, in a sense, becomes communal.

I’ve also sat with injured paramedics — heroes and leaders among us. They often try to serve as examples for others. They’ll say: “I’ve been injured, but we must continue our work. And if I can’t continue, then you must.” Or: “I’m getting stronger so that I can return to the field.” In these cases, the relationship between the individual and the wound is almost positive. The injury becomes part of a collective mission.

I’ve met people who were wounded when they returned to their villages after the 66-day war. The Israelis fired directly on returnees. Some were martyred and others injured. Yet the survivors will tell you: “Yes, my leg is like this, but I made it to the village first. I made it to Maroun el-Ras.” They see the injury as part of their participation in liberation. They’ll ask: “Isn’t this how we liberate our land? Aren’t we going to pay a price? We can’t all be resistance fighters. So what can we do?” They reject the idea that liberation belongs only to those who carry weapons. The people who returned to the border villages after the ceasefire also took part in liberation with their bodies. Even the hospital participates in liberation, because it protects the people and allows them to continue living.

There’s one pager attack survivor I’ve heard about who returned to the front. By doing so, he denied anyone the authority to tell him that he could not heal. In returning, he declared himself healed, regardless of the shape of his wound. He declared that he would continue.

It is worth noting that in these cases, the individuals were injured recently; when we spoke, they were not thinking about their wounds 40 years after the fact.

There’s a woman named An’am who lost limbs during the 1982 Israeli invasion. Her family had been displaced to a school in Saida when it was bombed. Her mother was killed. Her father was injured. Today she’s around 50 years old. She wanted her story told, but she could not sit with me herself. She never married. She never allowed anyone but herself to care for her injured father. I can’t know exactly what she feels, but I imagine that the relationship between her, the event, and her body remains unresolved. Forty years later, she is still living with that wound.

What has surprised you through this work?

Of course I can’t tell you I’ve been surprised by the practices of the Israelis. But when you pay attention to the pattern of attacks that have occurred, you realize that this is a war on the medical sector in every sense of the word. That’s one aspect. T

he other is the lack of war medicine in the medical curriculum here in Lebanon. Even though we live in a country of successive wars. Between 2006 and 2023, there was no war in Lebanon, but there was war in Syria and in Gaza. We should have understood that what was happening there would happen here too.

We can’t always wait for some Western model to reach us. We shouldn’t wait for the documentation of war medicine in Ukraine and Russia to begin our own documentation. Their experience is not like ours. They [the Israelis] are experimenting new weaponry on us. In each war, they’re asking: How can we hurt them more?

Is there something you documented from this most recent war that stays with you?

In Burj Qalaway, there was an Islamic Health Authority medical center where many paramedics were stationed. Some were inside the building; others slept in their cars or sat outside between shifts. The center was targeted, and 12 people were killed, including doctors. In one video recorded afterward, a paramedic who survived the attack walked through the site, recounting what had happened. He pointed out where they used to sleep and where they found the bodies of the martyrs, one of whom was his father.
Not long afterward, that same paramedic was martyred in another Israeli strike.

What happened in Burj Qalaway was not an isolated incident. It is representative of what many paramedics have experienced throughout the war. Today, some describe deliberately spreading themselves out when they’re in the field — one person beneath a tree, another under an electrical line — so that if they are targeted, they will not all be martyred at once. Someone, they say, has to be left alive to collect the bodies.

Even after the so-called ceasefire on April 16, the attacks continued. We thought our documentation work was finished. Then, on April 17, there was another strike. On April 18, another. Even now, when the war is supposedly over, reports continue to arrive. The archiving does not end.

This piece appears in the twenty-second issue of The New York War Crimes.