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.

Danica Rachel

Eyewitness to genocide

Since the start of the genocide in Gaza, the violence and repression from the Israeli military have risen dramatically in the occupied West Bank. According to the UN, more than 600 Palestinians, including more than 100 children, have been killed by Israeli forces and settlers in the West Bank since October last year. Now, West Bank villages are being subjected to the heaviest assaults in decades.
But even in these circumstances, students at West Bank universities are organising resistance. Ghaied Hijaz is a Birzeit University activist in the <a href="http://right2edu.birzeit.edu/">Right to Education</a> campaign, which defends the rights to education of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. She spoke to Red Flag’s Danica Rachel about the West Bank’s current situation and Palestinian university activism. The text has been edited for length and clarity.
When did the Right to Education campaign at Birzeit University start, and what is it about?
The Right to Education campaign started in 1988 during the First Intifada. We document any violations, especially when it comes to education or students or academics. We provide legal assistance to students and teachers who get arrested and also after they’re released from Israeli prisons. We help them cope and get back on track with their academic performance and everything else. 
We also mobilise and create a broad network of solidarity groups in the United States, Europe and Asia, basically everywhere. Before the war, we used to receive many visitors to the campus from different universities, mostly US universities. We talked to them about the situation we witnessed, the Palestinian issue and Palestinian rights.
It’s an independent group. It has a diverse collection of people from every single political and ideological background—Fatah or PFLP [Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine] or Hamas or anyone. We work with the student factions in different universities, no matter what their background, and we sometimes create events and activities in different universities.
Has it become more difficult to be politically active in the West Bank since 7 October?
Definitely. In the first 24 hours after October 7, the arrest campaign started in the West Bank, and within the first week, there were hundreds of detainees. It has been ten months, and there have been more than 10,000 or 11,000 arrests. We have seen cases of people being arrested for their Facebook posts, and sometimes their sentence is longer if their post got more interactions. 
People are arrested every day—our friends, classmates or family. Conditions in the prisons are terrible, that we have not seen in years, and maybe we have never seen before. People who get out of prison describe it as a torture camp. They compare it to Abu Ghraib. So it’s become difficult, because you feel like you’re always targeted, and if you’re not targeted by the Israeli occupation, you’re intimidated by the Palestinian Authority. So we feel like every single word we say we’re going to pay for it, and we are watched all the time.
What organising and activism have you been able to do since the genocide started? Are you mainly focused on local issues or is Gaza solidarity also a focus?
Of course, we are focusing on Gaza. Mainly, we have been joining other organisations and grassroots initiatives in the West Bank to try to organise a state of popular, peaceful resistance. But in the West Bank, we have been met with military violence. Before, when towns were raided, they would not shoot at anyone going on the street. The increased military violence increased the fear, and that also decreased the ability to organise. Because when you are organising a peaceful protest heading to a checkpoint or something, it’s almost like a suicide mission. 
In addition to that, with military checkpoints, movement became impossible between cities. And so cities were isolated and people were isolated. There was no ability to join people from different cities and organise a main, big protest or something, and that also decreased the ability to organise, but people still continued organising protests and sit-ins in the centre of the cities or at embassies or at the UN.
And also boycott campaigns. We also keep raising awareness, documenting, researching, and creating spaces where people can sit and discuss political issues. But everything that has been done, whether it was in the university or outside the university, is focused on Gaza, is focused on our efforts to stop this genocide, to resist the occupation and to just save the people.
Is it true that you ran the German ambassador to the Palestinian Authority off your campus?
He was in a museum next to the university. His visit was, he said, an effort to address the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and to discuss further cooperation initiatives or something. 
But the students were not able to accept the presence of the ambassador of Germany, who supported the genocide from day one and spread dehumanising propaganda against Palestinians, and denied our right to exist and to resist. There is no acceptance of these colonial powers of these genocidal countries. And so students didn’t even think, and they just went to the museum and demanded that the German ambassador leave immediately. And he left; he was forced to leave.
How does student activism relate to the broader Palestinian resistance?
If we want to look at the history of the Palestinian revolution, it started with students. It started with refugee students in Egypt and in the Gulf areas, and they created the Palestinian factions, all of them, without any exception—from Fatah, to the PFLP, to Hamas. So the role of the students is to maintain this revolutionist mindset, to maintain the resistance, to maintain the ability to organise and to object to what undermines our rights. 
And we have seen the student movement’s role even after that, in the First Intifada and the Second Intifada, and in recent years—how they always stood in the face of any policy that was meant to undermine the role and the meaning of the student movement.
On another level, especially after 7 October, many students have found their way to participate in physical violent resistance, joining small military groups, as in Tulkarm and Jenin, that we call Kateeba Tulkarm [Tulkarm Brigade] and Kateeba Jenin [Jenin Brigade]. They’re just students who, most probably, were not able to get to their university, and lived in a refugee camp for all of their lives and witnessed the continuous Israeli raids. 
So they’re also part of the student movement, and they’re part of the Palestinian revolution, because the Palestinian resistance could not just be forced to be peaceful, because when we are met with extreme violence, we are supposed to defend ourselves in the same way. And so these active students are also part of the student movement to play a fundamental role in the Palestinian resistance and the Palestinian revolution.
Does what you do on the campuses influence the broader politics of the West Bank?
I would say so, yes, because, especially at Birzeit, it’s kind of the most open university and the university where people can actually express their opinions and develop, let’s say, their ideologies and their political identity. So everybody that goes to Birzeit goes through this healthy process of accumulating ideas, accumulating concepts to go into society and be an active political citizen. And many of them go and work with humanitarian organisations, political organisations, cultural organisations. 
What impact has the global student movement had at Palestinian universities and among other activists in the West Bank?
It had such a great effect. Most of the universities in the West Bank turned to online learning for the first three, four months of the war. And still, until now, there are some universities that cannot teach on campus. So student organising, student activism decreased. Students felt like they were out of touch not being able to do anything. 
When the encampments started, students in the West Bank looked, felt ashamed, because these are people outside who are doing stuff that we’re not doing. We’re just sitting home and we’re not able to do anything. So I would say that it’s revived the spirit of the students again, because after three or four months of just continuous disappointment and feeling helpless and useless, they felt again that, yes, students can do something. 
The scenes of the encampments were so inspiring and they encouraged us to try again. Let’s try to organise protests again. Let’s try to have an influence again. If people in the West, in the US, and in Australia and in France, who are not physically connected to the struggle, are doing this, we can do that too. We should do that too. 
And then, in Birzeit, even though we had protests and activities before, we also started a symbolic encampment in solidarity. Then, to strengthen the student movement and the student encampments, we created the Popular University for Gaza, or, as we called it, the Martyrs’ University for Gaza, where we held discussions and lectures and protests, just to strengthen the student movement, to revive the student movement and also to stand in solidarity with the students in Gaza.
Thousands of students in the West have been following what’s going on in Palestine. What’s something you think activists might not know, but should know about Palestine and the current situation?
I don’t know if these are new things to say, but I would say that the most important thing for people to remember is how crucial these days are. This war is not just like any other war. We had escalations before, the violence was escalated before, the First and the Second Intifada, the wars in Gaza. But this war is different.
The threat is not just about the death of people, it also includes the complete erasure of Palestinians. When we say genocide, we mean genocide because we see it happening with more than 40,000 people killed in Gaza, and possibly much, much more.
If the war stops right now, it doesn’t mean that everything is solved, because we still have a major crisis. In Gaza, they have nothing to live with. People would have to leave if they had no schools, no universities, no municipalities, disease spreading. And that’s the plan that [Israeli National Security Minister Itamar] Ben Gvir and [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu were always saying: to limit or to decrease the population of Gaza. That’s genocide, that’s ethnic cleansing, and it has never been more clear. 
And the same is happening in the West Bank. Residents of towns and villages are subjected to daily raids from Israeli settlers, not just the military. And so we are seeing the actual threat of ethnic cleansing—it’s very obvious and it’s very clear.
We must not fall into this discourse of just calling for a ceasefire. We have to call for justice, for freedom.

Organising under apartheid: interview with a Palestinian student activist

A recent <a href="https://essentialreport.com.au/reports/13-june-2023">Essential poll</a> found that 79 percent of Australians believe social classes still exist in Australia. This is unsurprising, given the distribution of wealth. For example, the Australia Institute’s <a href="https://australiainstitute.org.au/report/inequality-on-steroids-the-distribution-of-economic-growth-in-australia/">Inequality on Steroids report</a> estimates that the top 10 percent of Australian income earners received 93 percent of the benefits from all economic growth in the decade from 2009 to 2019.
Of Essential poll respondents, 49 percent consider themselves to be middle class, 30 percent self-identify as working class and 4 percent as upper class. This raises a question: what is a social class? 
Definitions typically revolve around income. “Middle class”, we’re often told, means earning something like the median income—about $65,000 a year <a href="https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/labour/earnings-and-working-conditions/employee-earnings/aug-2022">according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics</a>. There’s no consensus on how much below or above this figure someone can earn while still being in the middle. 
This is a vague way to define class and is ripe for misinterpretations and distortions. An <a href="https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/millions-to-wear-cost-of-stagethree-tax-cut-retreat/news-story/656c97b95c52921b5e3fc382b390c0c5">article</a> published in the Australian last year described yearly earnings between $120,000 and $160,000 as “middle income” in an attempt to defend the high-end tax cuts due to be implemented by the federal Labor government next year. 
In reality, according to the most recently available <a href="https://data.gov.au/data/dataset/taxation-statistics-2020-21/resource/d902104e-a9c1-4d14-8d21-f4538bda037a">statistics</a> from the Australian Taxation Office, people making this much money are comfortably in the top 15 percent of Australian income earners.
More sophisticated classifications refer to education levels, cultural interests and family occupations as well as income. But again, the outcome is imprecise. Anyone with a university degree becomes middle class, and “working class” often becomes a synonym for “lower class”—that is, anyone economically worse off or with lower formal education levels than those in the “middle”.
 Socialists are more precise. While income can often be an indicator of social class, we define the latter in terms of people’s relationship to society’s economic infrastructure. That gives us three categories: the capitalist class, the working class and the middle classes.
Capitalists are the parasites at the top. They’re the executives, CEOs and board members who own and/or control the big companies, and with them the machinery, farmland, office buildings, media outlets, electricity grids, telecommunications infrastructure, ports and so on. They own the “means of production”, which they put to use with the singular purpose of generating profit.
Workers, on the other hand, don’t own any means of production. They might own personal property such as a car, a phone, maybe a house. But while workers use their personal property to meet their daily needs, capitalists use their private property as capital—a means to generate wealth through exploiting workers. 
A worker might grow some veggies in their garden to cut grocery costs; an agricultural capitalist uses thousands of acres of farmland to turn a profit. A house owned by a worker is just a home, but it becomes capital when owned by a real estate investor, used to generate wealth on the market.
The threat of poverty, homelessness and starvation gives workers no choice but to sell the only thing they can: their capacity to labour. They are deprived of control over much of their daily lives, having little say over the work they do or the workplaces in which they are employed. Even simple dignities like meals and bathroom breaks in many places can be taken only when allowed by the boss. 
The number of people fitting this definition of “working class” is difficult to quantify. Diane Fieldes, writing in the 2005 anthology Class and struggle in Australia, <a href="https://sa.org.au/marxism_page/csaseminars/Working_class.pdf">estimated</a> that the working class makes up a substantial majority of the population—more than double the 30 percent figure in the Essential poll. 
“Middle class” also takes on a different meaning in this framework. It describes those who sit between the working class and the class of big capitalists. There are many different categories that fit in here: small business owners, middle managers, union officials, academics and state bureaucrats, to name a few. They can have different and contradictory relationships to the means of production—some are small capitalists, others just bureaucrats. What they generally have in common is that they control their own work or the work of others. They certainly make up a lot less than 49 percent of the population.
The Marxist definition of class is much more useful than loose definitions based on income or education. 
First, it gives us an understanding of how capitalism works. Workers and bosses don’t exist in isolation; they are intimately connected through exploitation. Capitalists own the means of production, but need workers to operate machines, maintain infrastructure, harvest crops, serve customers and so on. The workers are the ones who produce the goods or services that their bosses sell for profit.
But there’s the rub. For the boss to make a profit, they have to sell the products for more than the costs of production, which crucially includes what they pay their workers. So the workers have created value, but that value has been seized from them by the capitalist, and only a fraction returned as a wage. This isn’t just the case with blue-collar workers, but also applies to workers in retail, hospitality, healthcare, IT, administration and elsewhere. 
Whether a business is successful depends on how much profit it can make, and therefore how much its workers are exploited. Profits are the lifeblood of capitalism—and every cent of them comes from exploited labour. By understanding exploitation, we can understand how 93 percent of wealth went to the top 10 percent last decade.
Second, the Marxist definition shows that classes have counterposed interests. What’s good for capitalists is whatever makes their profits go up. This often means, for instance, paying workers less, cutting costs wherever possible and lowering workplace safety standards. What’s good for workers is the opposite: being paid more and having more rights at work. Thinking of class simply as where someone sits on the spectrum from “low income” to “high income” obscures this tension.
Third, defining classes by their relation to the means of production tells us who has power in society. The capitalists own the most important section of the economy, so they make all major decisions about what society produces and how it will be produced. And because of this control, governments must keep them onside. Otherwise, they might move their investments overseas, threaten the economy, or even outright depose governments.
But profits are generated by workers, which gives them a different kind of power. When a workplace goes on strike, its production stops, and therefore profits cannot be made. The bosses go to great lengths to avoid this happening. They’ll pit workers against each other and spread lies about unions to stop workers organising.
Finally, we can see who is needed to run society—and who runs it day to day. The capitalists portray themselves as the deserving few who are indispensable. But their profits and wealth are the fruits of workers’ labour. Workers, not bosses, construct buildings, run hospitals, and stock shelves. Workers run the world, but under capitalism they are forced to run it for the capitalist class.
Another world is possible, where workers run the world for themselves, because of the simple fact that the bosses need us, but we don’t need them.

Eyewitness to genocide

Organising under apartheid: interview with a Palestinian student activist

What is social class?

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