DURHAM, N.C. (RNS) — Dr. David Hasan has a recurring dream. He is in a hospital in Gaza at the tail-end of 2023, treating a dying toddler.
The boy has come in with a wave of other injured Palestinians pulled from the rubble of a bombed-out building. Hasan has no means to help the boy and must triage those more likely to live in the bare-bones surgical suite. So he cradles the boy close to his chest and says a prayer.
The boy dies. He frantically searches for the parents, but they have also likely died. He doesn’t know the boy’s name, so he calls him Jacob.
The dream is a flashback — the boy real. And Jacob’s death, more than two years ago during Hasan’s first trip to Gaza, still haunts the Duke University neurosurgeon, who is now building one of the most ambitious Palestinian-Israeli humanitarian undertakings in Gaza, begun as the fragile ceasefire between Israel and Hamas took hold.
In the six months since it became a registered nonprofit, The Gaza Children Village, of which Hasan is founder, president and CEO, has built five Academies of Hope — wood-framed tent schools that also provide an estimated 8,500 orphaned and vulnerable children two hot meals a day, in partnership with World Central Kitchen, and give access to pr …