"In Gaza, we are only just scratching the surface of the medical needs"
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00:00Well, ever since that attack on October 7th, Israel began its war in Gaza, a war that since
00:07has, according to the health ministry in Gaza, left over 41,000 people dead and two million
00:12displaced.
00:13We're going to be talking more about the situation in Gaza now with Javid Abdelmanonem in London,
00:19who is with Doctors Without Borders.
00:20Thank you so much for speaking to us.
00:23You yourself spent two months in Gaza over the summer.
00:27First of all, just tell us what the health situation is like there.
00:30Can doctors provide people with the care they need, given the state of Gaza at the moment?
00:40Thank you for having me.
00:41The short answer is no.
00:42What I witnessed is a war on the population of Gaza by the Israelis, which included a
00:48systematic dismantling of the health care system.
00:51And to give an example, in the first eight days of July alone, between the 1st and 8th,
00:57three evacuation orders necessitated the closure of 13 medical points, four primary health
01:05care centers and three hospitals.
01:08And amongst those was one of my projects.
01:10And that just goes to show that the loss of the health infrastructure means that we've
01:15been unable to provide the care that's needed to the wider population, and we're only just
01:20scratching the surface of the needs.
01:23And how safe is it for the medical staff trying to help people in Gaza?
01:26I mean, we've seen specifically medical staff being targeted as well.
01:30What kind of psychological effect has that had on yourself and your colleagues?
01:35Again, it is not safe anywhere in Gaza, and it is not safe in the humanitarian zone.
01:42I myself, just speaking about the colleagues I worked with directly, had five—in the
01:49space of five days in July—had three colleagues who had loved ones killed, including their
01:55children, both in Gaza City, up in the north, in the middle area, Nusirat, and in Khan Younis.
02:00There were multiple mass casualty incidents through July also.
02:05At one point in the space of nine days, there were four mass casualty incidents, which ended
02:10with 568 injured and 162 people killed, just in the ER in which I worked.
02:19This goes to show that nowhere is safe.
02:21The serial evacuation orders, which are issued day in, day out, on the Israeli military spokesman
02:28Arabic Twitter channel, create exoduses and forced displacement of people at any time.
02:36It creates an instability amongst the population.
02:39It's harassing to know that nowhere is safe, to live in fear of your life, to think that
02:43you might have to move tomorrow.
02:45My own colleagues were forced to spend nights in the open air outside the hospital after
02:52evacuation orders through July.
02:55It's a very destabilizing, very psychologically traumatizing experience, let alone that it's
03:00not physically safe anywhere in Gaza today.
03:03Indeed.
03:04And what's even more impossible to imagine or comprehend, for those of us who have never
03:08been there, is how, for example, medical staff, people you worked with who are still there
03:12who are just trying to do their jobs, how do they keep up their stamina?
03:16How do they keep up their courage?
03:17Where does that strength come from?
03:20Listen, I mean, medics, we are professionals.
03:27We show up.
03:28That's what we do.
03:29But I was speaking to my own colleagues, especially on the day after they'd just got away with
03:34their lives from a strike in tents nearby or had to pack up their lives and move.
03:39And I've seen the despair in their face.
03:41But they turn up, professional, at work the next day, serving their own communities.
03:46And for them, there's a sense of pride, a sense of joy.
03:51But also, what else is there to do, is what they would say.
03:53They would say, what would you have me do, sit in my tent and wait for death?
03:57No, I will come to work and I will heal my compatriots.
04:00Javid, you've been doing this a long time.
04:03I believe this is your seventh war as part of Doctors Without Borders.
04:07How would you say this one is different from every one you've seen before?
04:12Yeah, this one has been unique in that in every other setting I've worked, populations
04:21have been free to flee the violence.
04:24Here it's precisely the opposite.
04:26The first day that I arrived in Gaza was June the 6th.
04:30And that night, the Israeli forces pushed through to the Philadelphia corridor and pushed
04:35through and took over the last remaining part of the Egyptian border.
04:39And then at that moment, very literally, not just metaphorically, but very literally, fully
04:45surrounded every person in Gaza, both on the sea, in the air and on the land.
04:50You can see the warships on the coast, and you learn to hear that type of shelling very
04:56differently to an airstrike.
04:58And you can hear the drones and see the Apache helicopters, and you can hear the quadcopters,
05:03and you know the difference between those sounds.
05:05The entire population is fully surrounded.
05:08There is nowhere to go for safety.
05:10I really want to dispel the illusion, the myth, that there is a humanitarian safe zone.
05:16There is no such thing.
05:17Javid, thank you for sharing your experience with us at Javid Abdulmanen in London with
05:22Doctors Without Borders, who spent two months there in Gaza over the summer.