HISTORICALLY, doctors have been among the most trusted by society at large. They routinely poll at our near the top of the rankings of those viewed by the public as the most honest and ethical.

Doctors take an oath to do no harm. They are our bellwethers of morality. They are not supposed to be our Cassandras, warning of doom but never to be believed. But that is how many now feel. And if we have arrived at a place where doctors are not believed, what kind of society have we become?

How many times can you recount the horror in Gaza before our governments act to stop it? “More than 25,000 children exterminated, hospitals and schools flattened, doctors executed, patients burned alive in their ICUs, aid turned into bait, starvation used as a weapons, cities erased,” intoned Dr Nidal Jboor at the start of one of the weekly webinars hosted by Doctors Against Genocide (DAG), during which his colleagues in Gaza report in live from their besieged hospitals.

Those doctors are no longer warning of the horror to come, they are living it, a hell that all of us can see in plain sight every day.

“We are risking our lives when we come to work daily,” said Dr Abdul Kareem, an orthopaedic surgeon at al-Nasser, the only functioning hospital in south Gaza that has already been attacked multiple times. That day, there were Israeli tanks just 250 metres away. No-one was going in or out.

“We manage 30 surgeries a day,” Kareem said. Sometimes that is by torchlight, to conserve the scarce power the Israelis allow them, so they can still run life-saving essentials like incubators. “This is our normal.”

Those surgeries invariably include people coming in from the “death trap” outside — the aid distribution centres run by the ill-named Israel-US Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Instead, the delivery of life-saving sustenance has turned into a shooting gallery for the IDF. As a result, Dr Kareem says, they see “30 to 50 mass casualties a day,” including dozens killed and even more seriously injured.

As the documentary Gaza: Doctors Under Attack revealed, a film banned by the BBC but aired by Channel 4 in the UK and via Medhi Hasan’s Zeteo media platform worldwide, those killed and injured include medical personnel. The film details how doctors, nurses and their entire families are deliberately targeted even though Israeli forces continue to deny this. But there is simply too much evidence, too many eyewitnesses, and overwhelming video and photographic evidence.

As the film shows, doctors have also been abducted to notorious “black sites.” Amnesty International has located four of these, but as their researcher Budour Hassan observed, ”What we were able to identify is just a drop in an ocean of horror.”

In Gaza the hospitals “are bombed into ash, doctors and nurses killed in their white coats, and patients — children, elders, the wounded — left to die on the floors of ruins that once promised healing,” Jboor said. And so it was time, the group decided, to do something practical about it. Time not just to talk but to rebuild.

At what is left of the al-Shifa hospital in the north of Gaza, once the biggest medical centre in Gaza with 540 beds, DAG is planning to build a new field hospital inside a perimeter fence on the hospital grounds. Fundraising is already underway and plans have been drawn up for a 140-bed hospital housed outdoors but in sturdy tents, along with two operating theatres, two recovery rooms and communal space for employees.

Phase one started on July 1 using funds already raised by DAG. Rubble has been cleared, including two hospital buildings that were beyond salvaging, designs have been drawn up and five contractors have already bid for the reconstruction project.

The engineering department at the al-Shifa hospital is overseeing the project, viewed as the only immediate solution in an emergency capacity to provide the urgent relief needed now.

Phase two, for which funds are now being sought, will be an 80-bed west wing, followed by phase three, the construction of an additional 60 beds on the east side. Damaged beds are being salvaged and repurposed. “Doing more with less” has become a daily motto. Permanent structures would have been preferable, but a field hospital is quicker and cheaper. With the entire Gaza population facing  starvation along with the daily bombings and shootings, time is of the essence there.

But the dangers of such a project are also huge, given Israel’s proclivity for targeting hospitals and killing doctors, part of a strategy to eliminate the capacity for Palestinians to survive long-term.

“We are always scared that there is a target on any reconstruction in Gaza, but that should not be an excuse for us not to do anything,” said Dr Karameh Hawash Kuemmerle, a DAG co-founder and Boston-based pediatric neurologist. “So we are hoping to raise funds quickly.”

Linda Pentz Gunter is a writer based in Takoma Park, Maryland.