Eyewitness to genocide

Dr Mohammed Mustafa is an emergency trainee doctor who went to Khan Younis in June to volunteer in Gaza’s Nasser and European hospitals. From a Palestinian refugee family, Dr Mustafa trained in medicine in Britain and Australia. Now returned to Perth, he spoke to Red Flag’s Danica Rachel about his experience providing medical aid in the besieged Gaza Strip.

Most people are now, unfortunately, familiar with all the awful statistics of the genocide. No doubt you were as well before you arrived in Gaza. But, beyond the numbers, what weren’t you prepared for?

When we first entered Gaza, it hit you within the first 200, 300 metres. There were dead bodies on the ground near aid that had fallen off aid trucks. People, out of desperation, go and try to pick up this aid, and if they’re in an area that’s a combat zone, or even if they’re not in a combat zone, get shot by a sniper and killed.

There’s smoke everywhere from the debris, and there’s thousands of people on the roads by the bombed-out buildings. They all had lived there, but now the homes are destroyed, and they’re just sleeping on the streets. You could see how desperate the situation was. There’s no electricity, no running water, there’s barely any food, and there’s hundreds of thousands of people crammed in very small spaces with nowhere to live and no access to any sanitation.

My first full day, we had a mass casualty event in the first hour and a half. There was a drone strike on a playground. There were about twelve children that were injured. Five of them were dead on arrival. Three of them were bleeding out on the floor.

I looked at the other doctors and we realised that we just didn’t have the equipment, the supplies, the expertise, the operating theatres to help these children.

I told one of the nurses just to comfort a child on the floor. And that’s all she did. She just sat, she put this child’s head in her lap, and she just stroked his head as he was taking his last breath. He took about four minutes on the floor, where he was just in agony until he died. And I could see that in the corner of my eye, as we’re trying to resuscitate another child.

Famine and extreme hunger are now widespread, and the UN has accused Israel of carrying out a targeted starvation campaign. What does this look like for a doctor on the ground?

There was a massive hepatitis A outbreak, to the point where even doctors with hepatitis A and jaundice were still working. Hepatitis A is usually a self-eliminating disease. But when you’ve been malnourished for nine months, and you’re a child, and you’ve got the constant cortisol release from the anxiety of constant bombs and artillery shells going off, that hepatitis A is going to have a massive effect.

We were seeing children coming in with liver failure. There was one girl, she was 14 years old. We managed to do a blood test on her, which we don’t usually get to do, and her blood was more acidic than it should have been. When I shined a light in her eye, her pupils weren’t responding to light, which essentially meant she was brain dead. And she’s brain dead because of the toxins in her body from her liver not being able to clear any out.

Her heart was still pumping. She ended up going into cardiac arrest. We spent about fifteen minutes trying to resuscitate her. But she was dead. And after I saw her, it was like a floodgate had opened. So many children had come in with hepatitis A and liver failure. I’d never seen anything like it. The number of children dying such a slow, painful death was unbelievable.

The other thing that we saw as well was kids coming in with malnutrition. So there were children that came in cachecticly [wastingly] thin—almost skin and bone and struggling to breathe. The electrolytes and salt levels in their bodies were so off from their malnutrition that their hearts were going into an abnormal rhythm, and some of them were having heart attacks and dying.

The UN has said that Israeli forces are obstructing humanitarian operations in Gaza—for example, by preventing their movement and bombing UN schools sheltering refugees, killing aid workers. How do the Israeli forces impact the provision of medical support?

You have to apply through multiple different aid agencies to get in. You have to be accepted by a particular NGO or a particular charity, and then you go through the vetting process. The Israelis require your passport, your birth certificate, your parents’ birth certificates and passports as well, and the names of your grandparents.

Originally, we were told that we were allowed to bring two bags of medical supplies. About one week before departure, we got told that we had to itemise every single thing that we had in our bags. We weren’t allowed to bring in any medications or drugs.

When I departed from Australia and arrived in Qatar for a transit flight to Jordan, I got a call from the head of our mission, saying that we weren’t allowed to bring any medical supplies either. I had with me eight bags of medical supplies that I’d managed to get through donations or I had managed to buy.

Our medical team was going to be 23 doctors. It ended up just being seven.

When we were there, there hadn’t been a single medical aid trip that had come in carrying medical equipment for six weeks. The sutures that we used were not suitable for humans. There were no painkillers. There was very little anaesthetic. We had no burns dressing. We had people coming in with 80 percent body burns, and we had no burns dressing, so we were just washing their skin with whatever little equipment that we had.

There was a group of doctors that came in the day after us, and they were turned away because they had a bag of baby milk formula.

Everything was really arbitrary of what you were allowed to do, and it would change almost hourly. And I don’t know whether that was done on purpose to disrupt the planning of the team and how effectively we can get things planned and sorted. The rules would change all the time, even a few hours before departure.

What is something that you think people should know about Gaza that they might not already know?

It’s hard sometimes to imagine that things are worse when you’re there on the ground than what you see on TV, because what you see on TV is children with heads blown off. You see people buried alive under rubble and people trying to dig them out with their hands. You see children who have starved to death. You see people burning alive in tents.

When you go there, the reality is even worse. What you see on TV is when the bodies arrive, maybe into the hospital, or you see them when they’re being pulled out from the rubble and the limbs missing and their heads missing.

But to go to the hospital and see the ones that survived: that’s a different story, because they are in extreme agony. They’re in extreme pain. They are alone. Some of these children are alone. Their whole families have been killed. I’d walk around these wards after I finished my shift, and we would have lollipops with us and things like that to try and give to the kids. But some of the stories and some of the orphaned children there—it’s just so difficult to process. And there’s no real support. The support there is other people in Gaza who are looking after these orphaned children.

What are the people in Gaza saying that you think should be heard by the world?

I think what’s unique about the people in Gaza is how resilient they are. They’ve been through bombing campaigns for the last twenty years, every couple of years, and there’s always hundreds, if not thousands, killed.

So Gaza has been through stuff like this before, and the people are quite resilient. But they’re also human beings as well, and there’s only so much human beings can tolerate. You can’t really generalise everybody in Gaza as resilient and the same. Some people are really struggling.

I was recording when we’d have mass casualty events to post and show what we were dealing with. Sometimes a family member would come up to me and they would say, “What’s the point in recording? We’ve been recording for nine months now, ten months now, and nobody cares”.

Then there are other people that would say, “Look, I want to show you”. It’d be a mother, she would hold my hand, and she would take me to her child who was dead and had burns and blast injuries. And she would pull back the covers and say: “Video this, show the world this”.

Some people are still hopeful that the world is going to do something about it, and the world is watching. Others have lost hope.

When I spoke to the doctors and the nurses and certain patients, they were really moved by the amount of support that the world was showing them. They would say the politicians and the governments have always been against us, but now the people are with us. I think that gives them a lot of hope as well.

We would see graffiti on walls of college campuses [around the world] and things like that, and people were really, really moved by the students.

There’s this air of hope that we’re coming to the end of this occupation. We’re coming to the end of this illegal war and these war crimes. The apartheid state is crumbling in on itself. There’s a lot of people that believe that in Gaza. You can go through the same ward round, and you could be lost with grief and you could be filled with hope and inspired, all at the same time.

So it’s very varied, but I think the overall message from them is: “Just keep going, it is making a difference”. I think for the first time the people of Gaza don’t feel like they’re alone any more.