Not long into the current Gaza conflict, Dr. Rebekah Boyd received a video from a Palestinian family.
The family was south of Gaza City. Their baby, who breathed through a tracheostomy tube, was on the back of a donkey with a portable ventilator. Other stories came later. In another family, a child was outgrowing the shunt from her Glenn procedure, one of a series of lifesaving open-heart surgeries for babies with a certain congenital heart defect. Without the next surgery, her lungs would no longer receive enough blood.
Throughout the conflict zone, the youngest and weakest were suffering from lack of medical care.
“These children need treatment, and we're going to do everything we can to make that happen,” says Boyd.
She knows it’s a tall order. She’s also seen it done.
Though Boyd was born in the United States, she was raised in Gaza. Her parents’ non-profit, Shevet Achim, was founded to connect children with congenital heart defects to hospitals in Israel and Egypt. Having grown up crossing the hotly contested Gaza borders with critically sick children and their families, Boyd watched the October 2023 start of the current conflict and knew what its cost would be for babies with fragile health. A cardiovascular and thoracic surgeon with the Duke Global Health Institute, she started the Impact of Conflict on Gazan Children With Heart Disease Bass Connections project in 2024. The project continued through 2026. This Bass Connections team’s goal was to identify the children born with heart defects since the start of hostilities and rebuild the connections to Israeli hospitals for those who needed treatment.
It hasn’t been linear or easy, but for Boyd this has been a lifelong mission.
“I've been doing this work since I was 5 years old in one way or another,” she says.
Boyd’s parents, a journalist dad and an art teacher mom, founded Shevet Achim – Hebrew for “brothers dwelling together” – in 1994 after her dad’s investigative journalism revealed that babies with heart defects were being denied permission to cross the border for surgery. The family moved to a refugee camp on the Egyptian border, and that is where Boyd grew up.
“I went to public Palestinian school,” she says. “I wore hijab. I became fluent in Arabic.”
In some ways, it was an uneventful childhood. Even with schools separated by gender, teenagers still had crushes, which took the form of surreptitious love letters. She learned how to wear a hijab fashionably (the secret involves hairspray and an iron). In other ways, it was not. She crossed the Gaza border so regularly that her dad was on a first-name basis with the guards. Once, as a teenager, she was in a hurry and was still wearing her hijab when she got to the border checkpoint. This was the only time she was strip-searched.
She also remembers the simple things that wowed Palestinian families when they left Gaza for lifesaving surgeries.
“A dad was accompanying his baby. We were on the highway and he goes, ‘I’ve never driven on a road like this,’” Boyd recalls. “The road was so smooth. There were no potholes or cracks.”
After high school, she took a gap year in India, teaching English at a Bangaluru orphanage. Boyd thought she had seen poverty in Gaza, but conditions at the orphanage were grim. Persistent lice and scabies tormented the children. It would be young Boyd’s first public health problem, as she realized the cause of the scabies: The children all shared underwear from a common pile. Boyd raised money with a drama club she had started to buy the children three pairs of underwear each.
“From these experiences, I knew I wanted to do something in medicine,” Boyd says. “I had this idea that I was going to become a cardiac surgeon.”
She returned to the U.S. with that dream in mind and started college, only to find herself teenaged, pregnant and continents away from her parents in Gaza. She withdrew from that university. Soon she was living in rural Colorado near her grandparents, a single parent working nights at a diner. She enrolled in community college.
“I had to be able to take care of my son as quickly as possible,” Boyd recalls. “It was just the two of us.”
She attended nursing school and became a cardiothoracic ICU nurse. Boyd worked in emergency rooms and performed sexual assault examinations in rural Colorado and Utah. The heart surgeon dream seemed to have passed, but her desire to do the right, hard thing had not.
“I got remarried. I had three more children. And then my husband, was like, ‘You should really think about going back to medical school,’” Boyd says. “It seemed like an impossibility.”
They took a gamble. They sold their house. And suddenly doors started opening, one after another, leading to a medical degree from Columbia University. Today she is at Duke, as a global health resident of integrated thoracic surgery, where the intersection of cardiac surgery and global health has brought her attention back to Gaza.
“When you think of war, you often think of bombing and amputees and destruction,” says rising senior Fiza Khan, who is studying pre-med at Duke. “You don’t think about the population that goes unaddressed.”
Khan adores children. She jokes that she rushes over to play with kids the same way her friends do with puppies. She was immediately drawn to Boyd’s Impact of Conflict on Gazan Children With Heart Disease Bass Connections project.
“These kids, they don't get early diagnosis. They realize they have this disease when they start suffering and they start turning blue,” Khan says. “They spend the rest of the life that they have suffering until their heart gives up.”
The reason hasn’t been studied in depth, but there is an unusually high occurrence of congenital heart disease in Gaza, Boyd says. From her childhood with Shevet Achim, she knew that the bulk of Gazan children with heart disease had been seen by Israeli hospitals before the conflict. It was slow work, but her Bass Connections team gathered the names of close to 2,000 children and information about their conditions and surgeries.
“We are working now to start an electronic registry of these kids so that we can track them, get them plugged back into care and then find the ones that we know that had time-sensitive surgeries,” Boyd says.
“With one or two surgeries, these children could go on to live a completely normal life,” Khan says. “If they were born in any other place, it wouldn’t be a big deal.”
Khan knows what it’s like to be young and rendered helpless by a medical condition. She grew up west of Durham in High Point, North Carolina. One morning during middle school, she woke up and couldn’t move. After doctors at several hospitals failed to diagnose Khan, she came to Duke. Here, doctors were especially attentive to detail, and eventually successful. The swarms of Duke students with book bags left her feeling like she was inside an educational city. She wanted to be one of those students one day – and to go into medicine.
Boyd’s Bass Connections team helped Khan clarify that goal.
“There's a gap in the world,” Khan says. Knowing that Boyd goes into spaces generally considered unsafe to help others inspired Khan. She became an emergency medical technician in August 2025. “Now I'm really interested in emergency medicine,” Khan says.
Duke students are naturally driven, says Dr. Henry Rice, but they especially rise when they encounter someone who is passionate about a major global challenge. Rice, a Duke pediatric surgeon and global health professor, works closely with Boyd as the co-lead of her Bass Connections team. Whereas Boyd has deep experience with congenital heart disease among Gazan children, Rice has a broader interest in health care for children in conflict zones.
“It is never easy, because armed conflict always involves political challenges,” Rice says. “We focus on these children. Their lives have inherent value. I think Rebekah lives that and breathes that.”
As Rice and colleagues noted in a 2019 paper, more than half of children worldwide live in settings of armed conflict – a figure they found to be rising. The lessons the Impact of Conflict on Gazan Children With Heart Disease team learns about identifying sick kids in need and connecting them to hospitals could be applied to any conflict zone.
“We are advocating for what these children need to live full, healthy and productive lives, and we don't want that to get lost,” says Rice. “It's not unique to Gaza. It's not unique to children with heart disease.”
Boyd, too, works with young patients in other areas – in Guyana, Honduras and Ghana – and is complementing her medical degree with a master’s in theology and ethics at the Duke Divinity School. In the fall, Boyd heads to the University of Oxford in England for a master’s in practical ethics. Her deep dive into ethics is just one more part of her toolkit as she pursues her lifelong mission.
“There are 300,000 children who die every year in the world from treatable heart disease,” Boyd says. “Every morning when I get up, I think, ‘What are you going to do in the next 24 hours before the next 822 children die?’”