Jeid Ebanks is a Capital Region native who grew up in Albany's Arbor Hill neighborhood and now resides in Troy.
Ebanks decided she wanted to visit the war-torn region as Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza raged on.
Last year, Ebanks spent more than two months in the West Bank before traveling to Gaza through an organization based in Jordan. She spent three weeks in a Gaza Strip obliterated by war.
Ebanks was part of a panel organized by the Albany Palestinian Rights Committee on Saturday at the Albany Public Library on Washington Avenue.
“Long story short, I just felt like this rage that prompted me to do something more and so I had to take a long reflection of myself and say what more can I do because we’re marching, we’re donating, we’re calling Congress and these people are still dying,” she said.
After hearing about an aid organization in Palestine called the Excellence Center, Ebanks says she began raising money with friends to go. She left in July 2024.
“In the medical program that I was with, I mostly worked with mobile clinics. Mobile clinics go out into communities and into Bedouin villages, which is basically in the desert where they don’t have access to medical care,” she said.
Video shared with WAMC shows Ebanks aiding during an operation on a patient's abdomen. She also performed physicals, gave immunizations, and conducted chronic disease tests.
Ebanks says she was surprised by the technology the Palestinian doctors and nurses had at their disposal. One of the nurses she worked with even taught her how to stitch.
While she was in the West Bank, Ismail Haniyeh, a top leader of Hamas, was assassinated. It was then that Ebanks said the West Bank started to get “pretty dangerous.”
“Because settlers and the IDF would come into people’s homes and businesses and take them out their homes and businesses and take them out their homes and just harass them. I remember being in the mobile clinic going down the street and seeing Israeli soldiers with people kneeling with their hand behind their head,” she said.
Israel has disputed such characterizations throughout the duration of the war.
Ebanks says her family pleaded with her to come home and although she understood their concerns, she was determined to get into Gaza.
“But I knew regardless of whatever I was doing I knew that I wanted to go to Gaza. Gaza was always the goal. From the very first time it was a thought in my head. I went to the West Bank trying to see how I could get to Gaza,” she said.
Ebanks learned over the Internet that doctors and nurses from Jordan were entering Gaza.
“So, I went to Jordan and I didn’t know anyone at all,” she said.
There, she found another aid organization that could potentially get her into Gaza called the International Medical Corps. But the next border crossing was scheduled for September 8th, the same day that Ebanks was supposed to return to the U.S..
So, she made arrangements to stay and told her family that she would be crossing.
But soon after, IDF soldiers were killed at the border, causing the crossing to be postponed. She returned home.
“I ended up coming back to New York. Just waiting around for a while, about a month-and-a-half, for International Medical Corps. to contact me with a new deployment date, which ended up being October 13th,” she said.
She then returned to Jordan before entering Gaza.
During the crossing, she was stopped at one of the checkpoints for about eight hours.
“And we couldn’t move forward because they were performing operations. The operations were bombs dropping within a mile of us that shook the ground. We hadn’t even entered yet, we were right there at that border crossing,-- and it was like yeah this is it,” she said.
But Ebanks did eventually make it in. She began working in a group of tents that functioned as separate units of a “hospital.”
She treated wounds caused by bombs, performed amputations and helped victims of mass causalities.
She says there were good times as well.
Ebanks says she handed out lollipops to children, arm wrestled her Palestinian colleagues and spent time with newborns.
Ebanks spent three and a half weeks in Gaza and came home in November. As Palestinians survey their destroyed territory, Ebanks says she would return in a heartbeat.
“If they called me tomorrow and say ‘we need you to come’, I’m going. Because that’s what it’s about and while I was there, I realized this is what I came here for. This is my purpose. To have that experience, to help save these people’s lives and then to bring it back and to show everyone the truth, the humanity of it,” she said.
This story has been updated to remove a reference to the "Gaza-Jordan" border. Gaza does not share a border with Jordan. Updated 6:51 p.m. 3-6-25.
