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 primary health care. The organization is now in the process of buying a semi-functional hospital in Gaza and transforming it into a pediatric health center for children with chronic illnesses who are unable to obtain ongoing care.

“We’re the only NGO that does these three pillars: immediate relief, rebuilding through education and rehabilitation, but also, most importantly, rebuilding the relationships and hope and talk between Gazans and Israelis,” Hasan, who is of Palestinian descent, told RNS.

The Gaza Children Village envisions several more academies, including a Mega Academy now under construction. A women’s center recently opened that is tailored to single mothers, where they can shower and get psychosocial support. There are plans for a university, a zoo, and more.

“David is a doer,” said Asi Garbarz, an Israeli activist who now runs the Israeli side of the charity. “He dreams something and makes it happen. He inspires us. He moves mountains. He really knows how to do that.”

The 53-year-old Kuwaiti-born and U.S.-trained doctor is the unlikely visionary who has won the support of Israeli authorities for a sprawling new philanthropic enterprise in the devastated strip, where an estimated 80% of the infrastructure has been demolished and more than 71,000 people — the majority women and children — have been killed in the two years since Israel laid siege to the enclave, following Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel.

Hasan has raised more than $1.5 million for the effort so far. The Gaza Children Village is a 501(c)(3) registered in the United States, but it has received the bulk of its donations from Israelis and American Jews.

Israel recently banned 37 humanitarian groups from operating in the Gaza Strip, among them some of the most prominent nongovernmental organizations in the world, including Doctors Without Borders, Oxfam and Care.

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The Gaza Children Village, however, has already been approved by the Israeli unit responsible for implementing civilian policy in Gaza, known as the Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories, or COGAT, and last week got formal recognition from Israel’s Ministry for Diaspora Affairs.

The reason, Hasan said, is its strictly apolitical posture.

“I try really hard to stay neutral,” said Hasan. “I do not use any words like ‘war crimes’ or ‘genocide,’ because it’s not my position. I’m not a lawyer. There are courts out there that describe that. I describe events I saw. I show pictures, I don’t use subjective words.”

Israel now demands that international aid organizations provide lists of all their Palestinian employees, including their telephone numbers, passport numbers, emails, marital status and children’s names. Many humanitarian groups such as Doctors Without Borders have refused to comply, saying it endangers their employees and violates privacy rules.

Israel has also made clear it will ban humanitarian aid groups for criticizing Israel. Hasan is willing to sidestep any direct criticism of Israel. And he’s willing to provide lists of his Gazan employees. He thinks it’s more important to treat the children, many of whom, he says, are dying a silent death from neglect and lack of medical care.

The last two years have been a whir of action. He has undertaken two medical missions in Gaza and has visited Israel five times since 2023. Last June he spoke at Tel Aviv’s Peres Center for Peace and Innovation. He met with Israel President Isaac Herzog.

He is singleminded. Hasan said he gets four hours of sleep a night — going to bed at 9 p.m. and waking at 1 a.m. so he can be in contact with his Gazan and Israeli teams who are seven hours ahead. By 6:30 a.m. Eastern Standard Time he’s at his clinic adjacent to Duke Hospital.

He does not draw income from the charity, nor do any of his Israeli team. Only the 250 Palestinians who teach in the academies or provide other services receive a very modest salary.

Hasan had never been to Gaza until two years ago. His mother, a Palestinian who fled the West Bank for Kuwait after Israel’s invasion in 1967, called him on the morning of Hamas’ assault to tell him what she was hearing. A few hundred militants had breached the Gaza border, killed an estimated 1,200 Israeli residents and abducted another 250. A few weeks later, after Israel began its retaliatory bombing campaign in Gaza, Hasan, who grew up Muslim and spoke Arabic, felt he should volunteer his services as a surgeon.

He was among the first group of 18 doctors from the U.S., the U.K. and Canada to visit Gaza as part of Rahma Worldwide, an independent aid organization that arranged their flight. He wrote brief journal entries about his experience working at a hospital near Khan Yunis in the southern part of the strip where more than 50,000 people were taking shelter. He sent those to his wife, Lauren, a trauma surgeon, who posted them to X. He also shared his experiences with a reporter from the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

It was on that first trip that he came across the toddler, Jacob. Hasan had only one canister of oxygen, which he gave to another child who he judged had a better chance of living. But he cradled the dying boy and stayed with him until he took his last breath.

“It just broke my heart,” he said. “He’s the ghost I have to live with. He doesn’t let me sleep and motivates me to do what I do.”

Of the 20 children he operated on during that wave of patients to come to the hospital, only two survived. There were no antibiotics. Limbs were amputated with no anesthetics. Electricity and water were scarce.

In that impossible setting, he found his mission.

Palestinians in Gaza have been eager to help. Ahmed Alnahhal, a 29-year-old Palestinian from Rafah, left his business delivering goods from Egypt to Gaza for what he thought was a short-term project to help Hasan build his first academy.

“But when I see the children, and how happy they were to go back to their school and study, something inside me said it’s so beautiful, something great,” he said.

He now heads the operation in Gaza.

Gazan children have not had formal schooling for two years, and Hasan is determined to reform the curriculum to focus on peace and respect for other ethnic groups. “We want to create good global citizens,” he said. Changing the curriculum is something Israel badly wants. For years it has accused the schools of promoting hate toward Jewish people and religiously motivated violence.

Palestinians abroad have been far less willing to support Hasan’s project. That’s mostly because Hasan is unwilling to engage in politics and because he works with Israelis.

Palestinian activism is focused more on fighting injustice than on immediate harm reduction, said Abdullah Antepli, president of Houston’s Rothko Chapel and a Muslim interfaith leader. “It is focused on the evils of human rights violations and lacks the essentially required element of minimizing human suffering.”

Antepli, an adviser for Hasan’s work, described the attitude of diaspora Palestinians as a “moral failure.”

But Israeli and American Jews have been Hasan’s most avid supporters. An August crowdfunding campaign inside Israel raised $70,000 for the Gazan initiative in days, said Garbarz, the Israeli activist.

Hasan has an easy rapport with American Jews, born of familiarity. His first two girlfriends were Jewish, and he had visited Israel on a trip with one of them. (His wife is Catholic, and they are raising their daughter as Catholic.)

He is winning the trust and admiration of more U.S. Jews.

“I think it’s important that our Jewish community really envelop him, his family and the work that’s being done,” said Dr. Adam Goldstein, a Durham physician and leader in the Durham Jewish community. “David has taken great risk. I feel this could be a once-in-a-lifetime chance. It’s a game-changer.”

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