Forced From Home Episode 3: “One Emergency After Another.” The Assault on Medical Care in Gaza with Dr. Thaer Ahmad
Despite a nominal ceasefire, life for people in Gaza remains grim, Israel continues to obstruct humanitarian and medical aid, and enormous needs persist.
At this year’s Refugees International Advocacy Awards, we presented the Richard C. Holbrooke Leadership Award to Dr. Thaer Ahmad, in honor of Palestinian healthcare workers in Gaza whose extraordinary service has saved lives under unimaginable conditions. In this episode, we hear from Dr. Thaer Ahmad about his experience providing emergency medical care in Gaza, the consequences of the Israeli government’s restrictions on medical supplies and attacks on hospitals, and the importance of advocacy in the face of inhumanity.
Timed Takeaways:
[3:00] Inside Gaza’s hospitals in the early days of the war
[14:27] “On the brink of collapse”: the impacts of obstructing emergency medical equipment
[22:25] “A miserable process:” medical evacuations for Palestinians in and from Gaza
[27:33] Targeted violence on the health system in Gaza and the detention of Palestinian doctors
[40:07] The West Bank: navigating emergency care as checkpoints proliferate
[43:58] The power of advocacy: protesting the Biden administration’s military support to Israel
[52:25] The harms of passive voice and the need to humanize Palestinian victims of violence
[56:06] Roundup: Displacement in the news this week
Mentioned in This Episode:
Legal analysis of the conduct of Israel in Gaza pursuant to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide – The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights
Thematic Report: Attacks on hospitals during the escalation of hostilities in Gaza (7 October 2023 – 30 June 2024) – The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights
Humanitarian Scorecard: Six Months In, Gaza Ceasefire is Failing – Refugees International
Palestinians Flee as Israeli Forces Raid a Major Hospital in Gaza – New York Times
How the Israeli army besieged and attacked Nasser hospital – Doctors without Borders
Scorecard: Israel Fails to Comply with U.S. Humanitarian Access Demands in Gaza – Refugees International
Update from WHO DG on People Needing Medical Evacuation in Gaza – Director-General of the World Health Organization
US halts visitor visas used for medical trips from Gaza – BBC
Your questions about our work in Gaza, answered – Doctors without Borders
This doctor walked out of a Biden meeting to protest Gaza – NPR
Idealism, Diplomacy and Power: Tony Lake’s Story – American Foreign Service Association
A Conversation with Ta-Nehisi Coates – The Key Magazine
Eyewitnesses Recount Deadly Israeli Attack on Medics in Gaza – New York Times
Lebanon Flash Update #24 – OCHA
Lebanon says two paramedics among 13 killed in Israeli strikes – BBC
Co-Chairs Call on U.S. Corporations to Reassess UAE Partnerships Amid Sudan Atrocity Concerns – Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission
Refugees International – Ways to Take Action
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This episode of “Forced from Home” was produced by Refugees International. Our technical director and sound designer is Joshua Suhy. Our executive producer is Madison Cullinan. The show’s production team also includes Eliza Leal and Sarah Sheffer. Our music is composed by Richard Adam Keyworth from Sound Pocket Music.
Transcript
Jeremy (00:03)
Hi, I’m Jeremy Konyndyk and you’re listening to Forced From Home, a podcast by Refugees International about global displacement.
This week we’re diving deep on the situation in Gaza. We’re about seven months into a nominal ceasefire, but life for people living there can hardly be considered peaceful. This episode is dropping on May 14, and tomorrow, May 15, the so-called Board of Peace will make a six-month written report to the UN Security Council about the implementation of the ceasefire deal that was signed last year. The following week, Nickolay Mladenov, who heads up the Board of Peace, will brief the Security Council on the first six months of that implementation. Mladenov and the U.S. and Israeli governments have made some wildly optimistic claims about progress on the deal’s humanitarian commitments since it was approved. However, as I talked about in the updates a few weeks ago, analysis by Refugees International and several of our partner organizations has poured some cold water over the happy talk that’s been coming from the Board of Peace on the humanitarian front.
The reality on the ground in Gaza remains extremely dire. Violence continues, basic goods remain incredibly restricted, humanitarian groups are still being badly impeded by the Israeli government, and medical care in particular remains incredibly constrained.
That last point on the continued obstruction of medical care will be the topic of our conversation today. And it’s an important one. The UN high level panel that last year concluded that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, pointedly cited Israel’s obstruction of medical care and targeting of medical professionals and its overall assault on Gaza’s health system as a major factor in reaching the conclusion of genocide. So today we will hear from someone who has frontline experience delivering health care in Gaza in the face of that unrelenting obstruction by the Israeli government and stick around after that conversation for a few other headlines that we’re tracking this week.
I’m here today with Dr. Thaer Ahmed, is a Palestinian-American doctor and humanitarian worker who has provided medical relief in some of the world’s most devastating conflict zones, including several times in Gaza. Dr. Thaer has completed five medical missions to Gaza and most recently spent a month working with the Palestinian Red Crescent in Hebron, in the occupied Palestinian territory in the West Bank. This year, Refugees International is proud to honor Dr. Thaer on behalf of Palestinian medical workers in Gaza who have served so courageously with our Richard C. Holbrook Award. That’s an award we give every year to frontline humanitarian workers who are doing courageous, life-saving work on the front lines of crises. Dr. Thaer, welcome to Forced From Home. We’re so pleased to have you with us today.
Dr. Thaer (02:58)
Thank you, thank you Jeremy, thank you for having me.
Jeremy (03:00)
Would love to start first with your experience in Gaza. You served there multiple times as a frontline physician. You’re an emergency room doctor. You faced unspeakable conditions there. Take us into what that was like. What were some of the challenges you were facing? What was the experience of providing care in a context like Gaza at the height of the war?
Dr. Thaer (03:22)
Probably the best way to talk about this is to talk about how hard it was to get into Gaza in the first place. We’re talking about in October of 2023, the Israelis completely shut down the borders. Nobody was getting in, nobody was getting out. And other than the Red Cross and perhaps Doctors Without Borders, there were no international healthcare workers that were able to enter and stand side by side with their Palestinian colleagues on the ground.
And we didn’t get word that we would be able to enter until the week of Christmas 2023. So already months had passed without being able to enter, without being able to do any sort of work on the ground. And so once we heard that we’d be able to finally enter into the Gaza Strip, it was January 2024, we tried to scramble together as much medical equipment as possible because we were having conversations with our colleagues who were saying, we’ve completely depleted our supplies.
Everything from medications, IV fluids, needles, gauze, totally running on fumes here. And so anything that you can carry with you, bring it in. And at that time we were able to enter through Egypt. And so you kind of land in Cairo, you hop on a convoy with a bunch of other UN workers and the WHO, and you make your way towards the border, Rafah, which is the border between Egypt and Palestine.
And I tell you, one of the most disturbing things was that Sinai Peninsula road. Whereas you’re approaching, you’re probably 20 miles away from the Gaza border. You start seeing trucks and trucks packed with aid and food that had spoiled that was not being allowed in. And you’re like, okay, you start to realize you’re entering into a completely different area. You’re entering into a whole new landscape. Nothing that many of us had ever experienced before who had been in conflict settings and who had worked in different humanitarian catastrophes.
And then once you get to the border, I’ve been to this border several times. It’s a bustling border. I mean, there’s long wait lines. There’s people going back and forth. It was empty. It was a ghost town. There’s a few Egyptian border patrol folks. But other than that, there’s nobody else there. And I think myself and my colleagues, we’ve had, we had 30 plus oversized suitcase bags of medical supplies.
And so finally, once we’re able to enter, the first thing you really appreciate and that you notice is there’s no electricity in Gaza. On the Palestinian side of the border, yhere’s no lights there. You the machines where you typically put your bags through the x-ray scanner. They’re not functioning. And so you’re just walking around in this darkness until you can get on the bus that’s going to take you to the safe house. And I remember that first night, they told us, hey, you’re going to be a place that Nasser Hospital, which is in the South. It’s the second largest hospital in all of Gaza. And at the time it was the largest because the Shifa Hospital, which is the largest and really think about it like a university hospital, like your main medical center. It had already been raided and rendered defunct in November of 2023. So Nasser was the end all be all at the time. That’s where you would transfer all of your patients. said, we’re going to send you to Nasser hospital. You’re going to be sleeping there. Do not leave the hospital premises for the month that you’re there. And there is a telecommunications blackout. So most likely you’re not going to be able to tell us anything about the situation there.
We’re not going to be able to restock you if you need certain supplies. And so it was a very clear message, like whatever you think is going to happen, think again, this is a totally different landscape. It’s a different scenario, but it’s nothing like you’ve ever experienced before. And I remember the WHO as they were preparing this, one of the things they mentioned was if you get injured in Gaza, we’re not going to be able to get you out. We’re not going to be able to bring you to Egypt. You’re going to have to get treatment at any of the other facilities that are still functioning and that are still available.
And man, that first day walking in the hospital of Nasr, I never seen anything like this. I worked in Syria, worked in Lebanon, worked in Jordan refugee camps, in Europe in the refugee camps when the Syrian refugee crisis was at its peak. But it was overflowing with people. Displaced families in the hallways of the hospital, right outside the compound of the hospital, tents were there. Every single room had multiple patients in it. Every single area of the hospital was occupied so much so that there people being treated on the floor.
And right when I walk in, they put me in this area called the resuscitation bay, which every emergency department has. And the idea is somebody who needs active interventions, like you need to do procedures on this patient emergently, this is the area that you go to. And we’ll bring in the patients there. And once you can stabilize them, we’ll move them to another section of the ER. And I walk into this resuscitation bay and there’s four or five people on the floor because there was just a mass casualty event. There was just a bomb that had went off, and one guy, a young man was on the floor and I could tell that he was pretty critically injured and sick. It looked like he was dying. That’s the only way that I can phrase it. And I remember just kneeling down and working with the doctor. I had not even introduced myself yet and we’re just working on the patient and ultimately he does die. And then look up and I didn’t even realize that his family was just huddled there next to us. They were just watching all of this take place.
And the doctor, Palestinian doctor I’m working with, he stands up, Dr. Majdi. And he looks at them and he says something in Arabic. He says this Arabic phrase, which means to God we belong and to God we will return. And that’s a phrase just indicating your son has passed. immediately, you know, this family, they, course, in the moment, the mom is crying. He has a young sister that’s there. She’s crying and the father’s trying to comfort them. And the doctor’s also trying to comfort them. So he says one of his last words too, was that he said a prayer in Arabic. said, we call it the Shahada. Basically signaling to the family. He was really like in his final moments was had this sort of spiritualness about him that he was able to communicate almost like he was at peace trying to tell the family he was at peace with what was going to happen to him. And then the family called on other family members to come and help them pick up the body of their son. And then they went off to go bury him near the compound of the hospital.
And that was that was what happened over and over again over the next couple of days and weeks. And all of this is happening while you’re hearing the bombs go off. And I’ve not been in situations like that before where the bombs are going off in the background. You hear them, but you also feel the closeness of it. You feel the pressure move through your body. And then 15, 20 minutes after a bomb goes off, you’re getting 15, 20, 30 people who were injured as a result of the strike.
And one thing I’ll say that really I don’t, I really don’t know how else to characterize this, but what it felt like was that the Israeli military at the time in Khan Yunis was just going from East to West. And the reason I say that is every single day that bombing was getting closer and closer. And as we’re looking out the window, you’re seeing this gust of smoke rising from buildings that are getting closer and closer block by block.
And you’re like, this is at some point, this is going to come to the hospital. That’s the, that’s the conclusion that you’re coming to. It’s just somebody who’s practicing in these hospitals. I mean, it felt like everything was working against the Palestinian healthcare workers and the patients and the people who were displaced in and around the hospital. Whether it was you started feeling the lack of food that was available, the supplies and the medications that you could use to give somebody some pain medicine or to help somebody sedate them a little bit as you try to set their fractures it was simply the neighborhoods just being leveled and the doctors losing their homes or their families in the process. It really tough experience, nothing that I’ve seen before.
Jeremy (11:01)
And the Israeli military did ultimately raid the hospital in February of 2024 where you were there at that time.
Dr. Thaer (11:08)
So I was there as they surrounded the hospital because you have to remember they put a siege on Nasser hospital prior to the raid that took place. And I remember the evening that we knew the hospital was done for. We were in the hospital and you hear a ton of bombing and tank shelling and it’s more intense than any of the previous days. And then there’s smoke filling in the emergency department, smoke filling throughout the hospital, patients and doctors and the displaced families were all coughing.
And I remember us getting in the room and two of my colleagues were with me, Dr. Hassan and Dr. Ahmed. We were in the room and you could literally see the tanks from the window. Like you’re seeing dozens of tanks around the hospital. And that shelling was was so intense. We were convinced shrapnel was going to fly through the windows and just kill us all. So we were, we were putting mattresses up on the windows. And I remember looking at the healthcare workers and I guess trying to comfort myself, trying to get some validation. But I was in the ICU with one of the ICU doctors and I said, they’re not going to attack Nasser Hospital. They’re not going to raid it. And he looked at me like, come on, man, you can’t be that naive. He’s like, why is Nasser any different than any of the other hospitals? And he listed them off. He was talking about Shifa Hospital. He talked about the Baptist Hospital in October that was struck. He listed them off. He said, they’re coming to Nasir and they are going to shut it down and we are going to be expelled from here.
And sure enough, that hospital over the next couple of days and weeks as the siege really became more fortified. It was this hospital full of patients. You started to see the families disappear, just walking more south to Rafah, the border town. The patients who were able to walk just leave with their families. And the only people that remained were the doctors, the nurses, and the patients who couldn’t get up and walk, the patients that were on ventilators.
And I’ll tell you one thing that I think is still, it’s a tough moment to think about, but I just remember two things, quite frankly, is I remember a knock on my door the night when they first surrounded the hospital and I opened the door and it was an anesthesiologist. And he said, have you guys heard anything about what’s going to happen to the hospital? Because they had made the assumption as internationals that we would get some sort of heads up. Hey, the Israelis are going to do this to the hospital, get out of there, evacuate or something like that. And I said, no, I didn’t. I’m like, I haven’t heard anything and I don’t even have service on my phone. So if somebody’s trying to reach me, there’s a telecommunications blackout.
He said, just promise me this, if you hear something and you do leave, take my two sons with you. It was this anesthesiologist who was living in the hospital and he just, he’s, I can’t leave the hospital. Please just take my kids with you wherever you go. He didn’t know where we would go. He didn’t know how his kids would, who they would be with or who they would stay with, but he just did not want them in the hospital because he knew what was going to happen.
And then just really the final thing was walking out and as you’re leaving, ultimately they, we were told, Hey, there’s no patients at Nasser. Do you need to go to another hospital, we’re going to redeploy you at Aqsa hospital in central Gaza. You’re like walking out in shame, really, we, there was nothing that we could do to stop this. There was nothing that we did that helped protect our colleagues in any sort of way. And you’re just walking out defeated that this major hospital is out of function and not able to serve the local community. was a devastating feeling.
Jeremy (14:27)
One of the things that we’ve heard a lot about is the, and Refugees International has been one of the organizations that has documented some of this, the obstruction of basic relief supplies being prevented by the Israeli government from entering the country. How did you see that take shape in your own work as a clinician and what were some of the accommodations you had to make in order to adapt to providing care without some of the basics of emergency medical treatment?
Dr. Thaer (14:55)
Yeah, that’s really an important point because I think the way that the Israelis were able to restrict supplies, they did it in a really insidious way. And what I mean by that is in Gaza, in terms of just the health care system being able to function, you always felt like you were on the brink of collapse. It was always one emergency after another. And I’ll give you a couple of examples that we witnessed. At Nasser Hospital, the administration one day said, we are running so low on fuel for our generators. We’ve got about 24 hours left or we’re not going to have any power.
And what that means, just so people are crystal clear about this, when the hospital power goes out, the people that are on ventilators will suffocate to death because the ventilators are no longer breathing for them. The operating rooms where you’re doing the life-saving surgeries for people who were injured in the bombings or the gunshot wounds or the tank shellings, the lights go out and the machines, the anesthetic machines go out and the people that are on those operating tables die because the surgeons are not able to do their work.
And, any of the other things that you’re using, whether it’s the -n or the x-ray machine or the computer that you can load the image and actually get some sort of interpretation of a chest x-ray, all of that goes by the wayside. And so it’s not just about powering the generators. Sometimes I’ve heard people like, it’s a rolling blackout. The lights go out or the automatic doors aren’t working. No, you’re talking about literally the ability for the hospital to save lives goes out the window.
And time and time again in Gaza, different hospitals, and we saw this at Nasser, where they are so close to that power going out and then the Israelis may release the valve a little bit and give them another couple of days. Or in the case of Shifa, the power goes out where they really want everybody out of the hospital and then the people that I just mentioned die.
In Shifa, November 2023, it was that really horrifying story of the 38 babies that were in the newborn nursery in the NICU. Eight of them died when the electricity went out. That’s an incubator keeping these premature babies warm. So they ended up dying as a result of that.
And that’s one aspect that you feel like, okay, were we able to get some fuel? Okay, we got a little bit of fuel. We can continue to function here for at least another 72 hours. And then you’re totally running out of antibiotics. You’re sitting there in a hospital where somebody’s leg is blown off. And so now a part of their body on the inside is exposed. And that’s a really high risk of infection.
Imagine you miraculously survived a two-ton bomb or your home being struck by a fighter jet or a tank shell and you survived it. And then you’re sitting in the hospital and then slowly over time you die because an infection takes over because you didn’t have the antibiotics that you needed. Antibiotics are not just, hey, I’ll give you one day and you’ll miss the next day or the third day. It was literally in a moment where you’re like, do we have any antibiotics at all? Anything to give this patient here in the ICU? And you’re just sitting there, not knowing when the next shipment of antibiotics would be allowed, when the WHO or the Ministry of Health would be allowed to get a truck in and deliver it to the hospital.
And then even when it does enter, when you do finally, when you’re finally able to get a couple of boxes of antibiotics, where do you send the antibiotics? Me as a clinician, as somebody in the ER, I’m going to be saying, it to me and give it to my patients. While somebody who’s at Al Aqsa Hospital in Central Gaza is going to be saying the same thing. We need it for our patients, and so suddenly it becomes like an allocation of resources problem where you’re like, where do we send the antibiotics that we just got in?
And I can go down the list, but suffice it to say that really what you feel like as a healthcare worker, as a nurse, as a doctor, you feel like a total failure in front of your patients. We’re like, hey, I know what’s wrong with you. I know you need this medicine or I hear you screaming in agony and I know there is a fix for this, but it’s just sitting on the outside of the border being restricted by a military saying, no, it’s not gonna come in.
It really was such a miserable process getting some of these supplies in. And it continues to be a process now, even though there’s a quote unquote ceasefire. This remains a habitual problem where you’re just not allowing a sufficient amount of materials to enter, the requested materials to enter, or any sort of real supplies where we can start to say, hey, we can provide secondary healthcare services, where it’s like, I’m not just here trying to focus on the emergency. I’m also trying to provide care to patients and just really help them survive any illness or ailment.
Jeremy (19:13)
Did you or your organization ask the Israeli government why these things weren’t being allowed? What was your understanding of why something like antibiotics, which cannot be made into a missile, know, cannot be made into a tunnel, even the sort of stated rationale, whatever one thinks of that, for some of the things that are being blocked, wouldn’t seem to apply to basic medical supplies like antibiotics. So what’s your understanding of the, least the nominal reason why those things were being prevented?
Dr. Thaer (19:39)
Well, so this is a point that’s raised. I’ll tell you that I raise it along with many of the other organizations working on this issue. This is something that’s raised all the time and not just directly with COGAT, which is the Israeli military arm that coordinates the humanitarian affairs in the occupied territories, which is an interesting name. I’m not sure you could call it that, but we raise it at the UN. We raise it with the EU. We raise it at the State Department. This is constantly something that we’re talking about. And sometimes, and you get a mixed bag of answers, you never get a consistent answer, which I believe is an intentional part of making this such a confusing and complex puzzle.
But one thing is the dual use excuse, whether it’s the bags that the antibiotics could be in, or whether it’s like metal supplies, this idea that these medications or that this dialysis machine for kidney failure or this orthopedic supply to help this broken bone or amputation that it could potentially be used in a nefarious way as some sort of weapon. And, you know, I’ll tell you, you can say, all right, I hear you. If that’s the case, provide us with a list of all of the restricted items here. Just give me a list. I don’t want to derail this one truck because it has one item that could be dual use because that’s how it works. You have a truck with medical supplies. If one item on its manifest is considered dual use, you better get that truck to the end of the queue.
Jeremy (20:57)
They reject the whole thing.
Dr. Thaer (21:02)
Reject whole thing, goes back to the end of the queue and try again. Sometimes, we were seeing us, it would take five or six months just to bring in one truck of medical supplies. So is there a list? Can we see it? There is no written list. And so it’s an evolving list that keeps changing, going back and forth. Sometimes some supplies are in, sometimes some antibiotics are letting, and you just, no rhyme or reason.
So as an organization that’s working on humanitarian response or a coalition or a cluster of organizations, you cannot plan any sort of response. I don’t know if this truck will get in today, but tomorrow it gets rejected. Then what do I do with all the items I just procured? And this is a problem we’ve all dealt with. You know where these items are? They’re in warehouses in Egypt and in Jordan right now. And they’re just sitting there and you’re hoping that one day you get a green light. The other thing that took place, which is so bizarre, and I know this is very technical, but it gives you an idea of how frustrating it is. But sometimes you’re getting approved. You’re told, hey, this truck can get in. So, you know, it’s in Egypt. Get it to Rafah, and then you get it to Rafa and there’s six different security checks and on the fourth security check it fails and gets sent back.
Why? What happened? No answers. There’s a pure lack of communication when you’re trying to raise these issues. And I’ll be frank, many of these governments, the European governments, the UK, the U.S., they’re not getting the answers either. So they’re asking these questions and they’re not getting the answers that makes any sort of difference. And that should tell you something. That should tell you something about just how things have changed in terms of any sort of response on the ground.
Jeremy (22:25)
Another area where there’s been a lot of obstruction is around medical evacuations. Is that something you were involved with when you were there?
Dr. Thaer (22:31)
Completely, yeah. I mean, this is something that we continue to talk about, and thank you for raising this because it actually goes both ways. I’ll say this. There are some really tough and tight restrictions being imposed by the Israelis by also medical teams being able to enter into Gaza and getting some of these patients out.
Right now, the WHO has a list compiled of nearly 18,000 people in Gaza that need medical treatment that is not available. And this is urgent medical care. I’m not talking about something that maybe you get your gallbladder removed in six months. I’m talking about kids with leukemia. I mean, I’ve worked on too many cases now with kids with childhood cancers that are completely treatable, that should be surviving these illnesses and are not surviving because they’re waiting on this list.
And the Israelis obviously have the final say in terms of who can get out. And it becomes quite a miserable process. And I just want to highlight a few things about it.
The first is you need to have a receiving facility that can provide the care for these patients. And right now, Egypt is just not the place where we can get Palestinians the adequate care that they need because it’s completely overwhelmed with many people who were able to get out when that border was slightly opened. Even though logistically you’re like, wow, Gaza is right next to the Egyptian border and Egypt is such a huge country. You can’t expect for them to be able to get that care. So you’ve got to look elsewhere. Where else can we get these kids treatment? Where can we get some of the treatments here?
And it’s miserable getting them to Western countries, Jeremy. I mean, first of all, we both know that the Secretary of State Marco Rubio has made a decision that no child from Gaza can get medical care here in the United States. Organizations like Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund and Heal Palestine, this is what they were doing. They were bringing kids out here and they can no longer bring kids to American hospitals that said, yes, we want to treat these kids. Doctors that said, yes, I will treat these kids. So the State Department has said no Palestinian kids can come here. Okay, where else can we go?
And you look at places like the UK, they have not been able to get any medical evacuations there, even though they’ve stated they’re interested in doing so. And it just tells you the bureaucratic hurdles that are in place here that makes it really tough. We don’t have that kind of time. I can’t keep telling these moms, yeah, they’re going to discuss it and they’re going to try to figure it out and they’re going to rate. It doesn’t work like that when you’re talking about urgent medical problems.
Jeremy (24:41)
Yeah, I can’t even imagine the stress and the pain and just the fury that these parents must feel knowing that their kids have a survivable illness that they may not survive simply because of that lack of authorization from the Israeli government.
Dr. Thaer (24:57)
And there was an established medical corridor that existed prior to October 7th. It wasn’t perfect. And there still was what we would refer to as medical apartheid. But these kids in Gaza would be able to go to East Jerusalem and West Bank and they’d be treated by Palestinian doctors. And it worked. It happened. Augustus Victoria Hospital, Al Maqasid Hospital, St. Francis, all of these hospitals that are in East Jerusalem could take these kids and treat them.
And they’ve said multiple times, that yes, we are ready to take these kids in. have the capacity. The funding is there. Money is not the issue. The issue is political will. And I guess I should note that this has been petitioned by Israeli human rights organizations. So it’s in the Israeli courts right now. The Israeli government needs to respond to petition to reestablish the court order by May 7th. And so I really hope that there can be some change.
I guess one last thing I’ll mention, just so we can really understand how ingrained, how this is a policy in terms of restricting these Palestinians from getting medical care.
There is a five year old kid in the West Bank right now who is from Gaza. He’s originally from Gaza, but he’s been living in the West Bank for three years. So long before October 7th, he has a bone marrow cancer, a bone marrow failure that he can get treatment for in an Israeli hospital. And the doctors there are ready to treat this kid. They’ve done all that sort of preliminary testing and they said, we’re ready to go.
And they petitioned a Jerusalem court about this kid, Israeli human rights and Palestinian human rights organizations. And they said, can we get the approval because this blanket denial of Palestinians is just ridiculous. And the judge ruled against this five year old kid. He ruled against him. And in his commentary about it, he talks about the security establishment in Israel has a blanket denial in anybody from Gaza. And although this child is currently in the West Bank, he’s still from Gaza. And his case is not enough for me to reverse the security establishment’s ruling.
And then he goes on to say this one thing that really troubles me. And he says, we know that people who used to travel from Gaza into Israel before October 7th, that they could potentially be human sources of intelligence. So that could potentially jeopardize Israeli security. Essentially everybody in Gaza is guilty. That all these Palestinians in Gaza are guilty because of that potential threat of them serving as some sort of human source of intelligence.
And so this kid, this five year old has to, that’s the decision that he has to hear about why he can’t get that medical treatment that he deserves. And so it really is bizarre, but I hope people can understand this is not just like a whimsical or like an emotional response. This is policy that’s at play here.
Jeremy (27:33)
And it’s not just, of course, obstruction that’s been harming health care in Gaza. There has been a concerted assault on health care provision by the Israeli military. There have been raids on hospitals, including Nasser, including Shifa, basically all of them at this point. Many of those facilities have been damaged to the point of being completely inoperable. Doctors and other health providers have been detained. And the UN panel of experts that last year put out its assessment that the Israeli authorities conducting Gaza amounted to genocide pointed to this pattern as one of the reasons for that, saying that a key indication of genocidal intent was this concerted, as they put it in the document, a concerted policy to destroy the healthcare system of Gaza.
You’ve talked a little bit about seeing the tanks outside the hospital. How did you see that play out and what does that look like today? So you served there early in the war before this full assault on the health system had played out. What’s left of the health system in Gaza today?
Dr. Thaer (28:33)
The health system has been brought to its knees. You can see that there was a concerted effort to make sure that the healthcare system fails. And this was carried out in multiple ways. And I think you’re spot on actually; every single clinic and hospital has been affected by some direct threat of assault or actual violence that was inflicted on it. And I talked about this before as one of the things that we saw in Syria was a deliberate effort to target healthcare institutions there.
Jeremy (28:59)
Absolutely.
Dr. Thaer (29:00)
And that the idea was if you get rid of the hospitals and you punish the doctors who are treating people, then people will leave. You know, they’ll flee the area, right? Because of course, one of the vital necessities that people consider in terms of their living situations and their survival is
If something happens, will I be able to heal myself? Will I be able to approach a hospital and get treated? Not just from war injuries, from the common cold, from pneumonia. Can I get, can my kids get vaccinated? The stuff.
Jeremy (29:25)
The sort of stuff that in the US we wouldn’t think twice about having access to, just completely routine.
Dr. Thaer (29:31)
Absolutely. If you remove the access to healthcare, you can encourage the forced displacement of people, which I think really was intensified in Gaza. What I saw was an Israeli military that went on to Shifa Hospital in November, that came to Nasr hospital in January and February. Even in December, they had surrounded Al Aqsa hospital in central Gaza. And you saw a policy being implemented where hospitals had become legitimate targets. And then the healthcare workers at these hospitals, when the Israeli military approaches, it’s not just the infrastructure that’s being damaged. It’s not just the windows being blown out or the walls being riddled with bullets. It’s the doctors and the nurses that are there being placed under siege. And as they’re told to leave the hospital, when they leave, many of them getting abducted, which results in 1,700 healthcare workers ultimately being killed, as well as hundreds of them being arrested, many of whom have now been released, but almost a hundred still in Israeli prisons.
Most notably right now, should mention that Dr. Hussam Abu Safiyah, who’s a friend of mine, a pediatrician who was at a northern pediatric hospital called Kamal Adwan, the Israelis surrounded the hospital and insisted that this guy leaves. They said, you have to shut it down and get out. He said, I can’t abandon my patients. I’ve got too many kids in this ICU. And they insisted that he shut down the hospital. And when he was able to miraculously evacuate all of those different patients that he had.
The second the hospital is empty as he’s walking out, he gets asked to approach an Israeli tank and that’s the last time we saw him free. The next time we saw him, he was in handcuffs in an Israeli prison. Dr. Hussam Abu Safiyah’s detention was extended by an Israeli military court and they are not even charging him with a single crime. No crime has been brought against him. And so since December of 2024, Dr. Hussam, a pillar of the medical community in Gaza, remains behind Israeli bars. And that can be said of many of the other leaders of Palestinian healthcare.
I think for me, Jeremy, it’s no coincidence that many of the major senior doctors who would teach generations of Palestinians are either behind bars or dead. And you can mention Dr. Adnan Al-Bush, who is an orthopedic surgeon, very friendly guy, always smiling. Anybody that goes to Shifa when you were visiting there, he was always welcoming. He was somebody that was tortured to death in an Israeli prison. His body was found at Ofar Prison in Ramallah Hospital, lifeless.
You you think about Dr. Marwan As-Sultan, one of the few cardiologists in the north. Somebody who, if you had a heart attack, you went to Dr. Marwan. On his way home from his shift, gets hit with a missile and killed.
These are the faces of healthcare in Palestine, not just Gaza. Everybody knows their names. If I’m an aspiring medical student, I want to train under this guy. If I’m a patient, I want him to treat me and my family. It’s no mistake that these folks were targeted. And so we talked about infrastructure kind of being damaged with the hospitals being attacked, the personnel under the threat of violence. And then of course, I believe that when you’re restricting supplies, like we had mentioned earlier, that’s also an attack on the healthcare system. So every direction they’re getting it.
Jeremy (32:39)
And under international humanitarian laws, health facilities are meant to have special protections. That’s not to say they can never be the subject of military action, but when they are under the very rare circumstances where that’s lawful, it’s a very, very high bar. There have to be all sorts of measures taken to prevent disruption of care, to protect the workers, to protect the patients, all of that. Really, part of the core of the Geneva Conventions is about the treatment of the wounded in war.
And one thing that really has struck me is over the trajectory of the violence in Gaza. Early on with the raid on Shifa, the Israeli government went to great lengths to justify what they were doing and to make all sorts of allegations, a lot of which were then proven to be pretty farcical later on about Hamas presence in the hospital. And there was one where they showed like something in Arabic script on the wall that they said might be Hamas related. And it was like, I don’t know it was just something totally routine with like childcare or something. It was just absurd, right?
But at least they were making an effort. They felt like they needed to justify what they were doing. And by the time you get to the second half of 2024, the Israeli military is knocking, is raiding hospitals and not even bothering with that anymore. Not feeling like that’s even, they don’t even need to go through the motions of justifying that anymore. And it reminds me very much of some of what we saw in Syria where the Assad regime and the Russian military would routinely strike health facilities, likewise in Ukraine, likewise currently in Lebanon.
This is an extreme version of what’s really become a widespread problem of just a total collapse of the sanctity and the protection of health care in conflict zones. Where do you think we go from here? You served in many of these places, not just in Gaza. What worries you as a humanitarian medical professional about where we could be headed on this?
Dr. Thaer (34:28)
You really hit it on the nose there when you talked about how there was no more justification by the Israelis as they moved on. I think what you’re seeing is the normalization of attacking healthcare facilities, that this is going to be a part of war. I think in five or 10 years, what I worry about is political officials, elected officials saying, this is just war. This is how it is. As opposed to saying, Hey, there’s international humanitarian law that we should be abiding by. Even what happened in El-Fasher in Sudan, just running into hospitals and gunning down healthcare workers.
Jeremy (34:55)
Slaughtering everyone in the hospital.
Dr. Thaer (34:57)
I will say a couple of things because you mentioned the really important point here is that there is international humanitarian law and with respect to the healthcare facilities they are afforded a lot of protections and there’s a certain amount of criteria where essentially you’re saying actually this hospital is not really functioning as a hospital anymore it’s a launching pad for whatever attacks or whatever it is. And I will say one thing that I think is important for people to know: I’ve been going to the Gaza Strip since 2010, and I have never once in any of the hospitals that I have been in, I’ve been in all of the hospitals and I have taught there and I’ve worked with the people there and I’ve treated patients there. I’ve never once seen, even, I would say armed people there walking around, people with guns moving around. You have a security guard maybe in the front who’s watching as people enter, but that’s exactly like my hospital in Chicago.
But the other thing is, over space and time, you’ve had almost 400 international healthcare workers enter into the Gaza Strip over the last two and a half years. Across space and time, so every inch of the Gaza Strip from north to south, we have served in many of the hospitals. Not a single doctor or nurse has said that they saw nefarious activity happening in any of these hospitals. And in fact, the Israeli military in terms of producing evidence, because these are hospitals we’re walking around in, I was at Nasser Hospital.
Shifa, they’ll show you a tunnel adjacent to the hospital and they’ll say, this is why we had to go in here. But then I would ask the question, okay, so there were no militia people in these hospitals. There was no fighters in these hospitals, right? Let’s agree on that fact. If there’s anything going on underneath these hospitals, does it justify us essentially condemning those babies in Shifa’s newborn nursery to death? There’s no other way other than to blast that hospital through and burn it to the ground?
Or at Nasser Hospital, after you raided the hospital and abducted many of my friends and colleagues, you tell me that this was a medicine that was supposed to be for an Israeli hostage. Does that justify the second largest hospital being rendered defunct? 500 people getting kidney failure treatment, who we’re not able to get their treatment anymore. Do you know what happens when you don’t get dialysis? You die. Toxins build up and you die. And so it’s just really tough to see the demise of these hospitals for really flimsy reasons.
And I don’t think we would ever accept that for any of our field hospitals in Iraq during the war or in Afghanistan. I don’t think anybody would have accepted that. I’d like to challenge people on this point because I’ve had this discussion many times with actual representatives of governments where they will say, did you see this? And then you’ll say, no. And they say, we’re being told that under. So after you say, I didn’t see anything in the hospital, they’ll tell you something’s going on under the hospital. And you’re like, are you kidding me right now? Come on, this is ridiculous at this point. It’s floating around and all these different excuses and you’re like, there’s actual human beings in these hospitals. People that are gonna die because of this.
Jeremy (37:48)
I’ve had those conversations with many doctors and who’ve worked in Gaza as well and heard just as you described. I think the only time that I’ve heard a credible report was something that MSF said earlier this year where they did pull out of Nasser hospital over concerns about the presence of armed actors. But I think it’s telling too, that’s three years into this. I think it shows that yes, like when humanitarians do see this, they will pull out. MSF spoke on it. You know what it was about.
Dr. Thaer (38:13)
Yeah, that’s actually also, I think it was a poorly written report because they did not elaborate on a major problem that’s happening right now in the Gaza Strip and that there are armed gangs popping up all throughout the Gaza Strip, some of whom are coordinating and backed by the Israeli military.
And these gangs, essentially what happens when you’re restricting aid, it gets back to the restriction of aid and food and supplies. What happens is anybody who can conjure up some gang members and you have some gangs, suddenly they’re going to try to usurp the supplies and there’s been a lot of reports of abuse from these gangs on the local Palestinians and absolutely you can anticipate that will be roaming through trying to get into a hospital so it underscores a security problem and I really wish MSF had gone more into that, and I wish they had I wish they had remained at the hospital. I think that was a mistake but that’s a discussion for another day.
Jeremy (38:58)
But I think your larger point here is really important too, which is that even if there were any validity to some of these allegations by the IDF, and I think it has to be said, there’s been very little evidence put forward that’s credible by the IDF that backs any of this up. But even if it were, that doesn’t justify knocking over the entire hospital and knocking it out of commission.
The IHL says very clearly, to the extent that there is military activity emanating out of the hospital, like offensive military activity, can’t just be like somebody sitting there. Then you have to take great care to preserve the functionality of the provision of healthcare. And that’s clearly very much the opposite that’s been happening.
Dr. Thaer (39:37)
And I think we have to take a step back and just say, really 37 hospitals, all of them had to go. Like the fertility clinic, the one fertility clinic in all of Gaza where people who want or had dreams of having a baby, you had to blow that up. And again, it’s also a pattern that’s replicated in the West Bank. And so it begs the question, like, what’s the end game here?
Jeremy (39:59)
And so you were in the West Bank recently, let’s turn to that. Getting more attention here now, still not as much as I think it merits, but what were you doing there and what did you see?
Dr. Thaer (40:07)
I mean, the West Bank is an absolute disaster, Jeremy. I mean, the proliferation of checkpoints is out of control. And I was working with the Palestinian Red Crescent and we’re talking about their ambulances not being able to get from one area of Hebron to another area of Hebron. Literally, there was a checkpoint that was installed and we had people on the other side who were calling 911 because they needed to get to a hospital. Talking about somebody maybe has a stroke or somebody’s concerned that their chest pain is a heart attack. We could not get to them.
There’s all this talk about…you’ll hear from the Israelis and they’ll tell you that you just have to coordinate these entries and these exits and all of this stuff. And you’re like, all you have to ask is how long does this coordination take? And if the answer is more than urgently or 30 minutes or 45 minutes, then it’s an absolute waste.
Jeremy (40:51)
And just to interject there. Hopefully everyone, if you’re listening to this podcast, I hope you have seen the movie Hind Rajab. And if you want to understand what that coordination process looks like in practice, go see that movie.
Dr. Thaer (41:05)
Absolutely. I you know, I visited the headquarters, the call center where that call came in from that little girl and many of the healthcare workers there are the people that are on the phone who are receiving these calls, the dispatchers, they’ve got these incredible, just an incredible amount of moral injury because of them hearing the calls for somebody asking for help and just not being able to respond to that.
It’s honestly incredibly brutal to tell you the truth. And every single day there are all these sorts of operations that are taking place in different neighborhoods all throughout the West Bank. But definitely like hot areas are Hebron, Nablus, and in the north, Tulkaram and Janine. It’s happening all over. It happened in my family’s village yesterday where there’s just this operation where a bunch of folks get arrested, get picked up, and then taken away. And the whole city gets locked down. And it really has shut down light in a pretty dramatic way. And we felt it through every aspect. Of course, you’re not able to deliver health care, but even on top of that, kids going to school or just the fact that people are trying to get together. It’s just disconnecting really felt, for example, Hebron was another part of the world compared to Ramallah. And Ramallah was so far away from Nablus. And of course, Gaza is its own island and another planet. And this idea of just an area where Palestinians can be able to move freely and interact with each other and communicate with each other. It’s just been piecing away.
And one thing that did happen, I think, just to touch on a human level here, there was a young man in Hebron. There’s so much construction that takes place in Hebron, I should say. It’s known as like the economic bed of the West Bank. And so many people are working there and trying to just earn a living and inflation has been devastating for them.
And so everybody’s trying to work two jobs or three jobs and one young man. He’s trying to help on earn just some extra cash by just driving a forklift and it tips over and it falls on his leg and he breaks his leg and his leg is displaced and he’s definitely going to need some surgery. And this is just, this is devastating for him because he’s out of work now. He’s going to be out of work for six weeks, eight weeks, and they’re just barely making ends meet. And I remember we went and we picked him up and we put them in the back of the truck and we’re taking him back to the ambulance and we’re taking him to the Red Crescent Hospital. And he kept saying something that made, it just really, it just hit me. And he just kept saying in Arabic, said, may God help the people of Gaza because I’m able to get in the back of an ambulance and go to a hospital and I know I’ll be able to get the surgery. I know I’ll be able to see a bone surgeon. I just hope it’s like a reminder for folks, even though if you look at a map and you look at where all the checkpoints and settlements are and you look at the siege, even though they just seem like it’s so disconnected, the people are still very much very connected and they feel for each other in a really deep and intense way. You can’t talk about Gaza and Hebron right now without somebody crying, without a doctor just crying for his colleagues or families just really worried about what’s going to happen to them. Despite all of that, the people are still very much connected.
Jeremy (43:58)
And you’re not only a doctor, you’re also an advocate. You’ve spoken out extensively. You broke through on the national consciousness, if I can put it that way, when you walked out of a meeting with President Biden in 2024. Take us into the room. What were you there to meet him about? And what were you trying to convey with that? What were you trying to achieve with that walkout?
Dr. Thaer (44:16)
Every month of Ramadan, the White House likes to hold an iftar dinner. And this was six months into the genocide. And the White House was trying to do a re-election bid at that time. And they had just suffered a pretty embarrassing result in Michigan, if you remember. There was 100,000 people, Michigan voters, who voted uncommitted. And so I think there was an effort to say, let’s try to reach out. And so the idea was, okay, we’re not going to be able to do an iftar. It actually looks, it looks pretty bad to be serving food.
Jeremy (44:46)
People are starving.
Dr. Thaer (44:47)
While people were starving in Gaza and the United States was supporting it militarily, but also diplomatically, I mean, we were rejecting a lot of the UN security resolutions. Linda Thomas-Greenfield was raising her hand famously on a lot of these resolutions that were coming through the UN Security Council.
The idea was we were going to be able to have a private meeting with President Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, Deputy National Security Advisor John Finer. Linda Thomas-Greenfield was there, our Secretary to the United Nations, our Ambassador to the United Nations as well as even Lina Khan was there, which I assume she was just there because she’s Muslim.
Jeremy (45:22)
She was the Federal Trade Commissioner at the time.
Dr. Thaer (45:23)
Yep. And we sat down. I remember President Biden walking in and at that point I had made the decision that I was going to stage this kind of like little protest of getting up and leaving because that week or the leading up to that world central kitchen, there was an attack on their convoy. Seven of them, you know, one Palestinian and six internationals, their workers were killed. The State Department had approved a fighter jet sale to the Israelis. And there was a quiet transfer of ammunition to the Israelis, all within this time period where they want to meet with us to hear about what’s going on in Gaza. And so I was really frustrated. And I think a lot of people in the United States were also really upset with the policy that President Biden was enacting. We thought he should take a more aggressive stance with respect to ending this.
Jeremy (46:05)
Yea, so did we.
Dr. Thaer (46:06)
Yes, yeah. It was such a disappointment, Jeremy, honestly. You really were hoping that as people are starving and the US weapons that are being used that we would exert our leverage to at least bring a stop to this. And that just was not the case. And so thought at that time the Israeli troops are amassing along Rafah, which at this point had 1.3 million displaced Palestinians there because they were told, go south, that you will be safe if you go to Rafah. They were explicitly told this.
And so there was a little girl in a tent. Her name is Hadid. She had written a letter to President Biden. She was eight years old and a friend of mine who was able to send me a picture of her and just send me the letter. So I had the letter printed out. I had her picture printed out.
And I said, the president has walked in and he said very quickly, which got me a little more upset, but he said, I hope you guys know we know a lot about what’s going on. That was one of his first words. We know a lot about what’s going on. We’re working on it very hard, but we’re here to listen to you guys. Almost like we’re going to listen.
Jeremy (47:05)
Like, I don’t want hear what you have to say, I’m going say I want to listen.
Dr. Thaer (47:07)
Almost like, also be grateful to be here. And by the way, I was the first person who had been in Gaza me and a couple of my colleagues the first people who had actually been on the ground in Gaza to brief the president or who were supposed to brief the president. Six months in? With our involvement everything that’s going on? That’s, I think, a little absurd. So I stood up after he said that and I had told everybody I’m gonna go first because I knew what I knew what I was gonna do and so I just stood up and I said, I have to leave this meeting out of respect for everything that’s taking place in Gaza, out of respect for the people that are there, out of respect for the community that’s reeling and that’s grieving. I can’t stay in this meeting. But before I go, this is a letter from an eight-year-old in Rafah. She’s begging you, do not let the Israeli military raid Rafah.
And then I looked at Jake Sullivan and I said, I know you’re meeting with Ron Dermer and the Israelis next week. And they’re going to try to show you the plan for Rafa. I’m telling you as a health care worker that’s been on the ground, it’s impossible. This movement of 1.3 million people, being able to move them and they can conduct military operations, it’s going to be a bloodbath. And then I looked at the Vice President because at that time she was promoting a six week temporary ceasefire. I said, what’s the point of a temporary ceasefire? That doesn’t make sense to me. We bring in some food. The Palestinians cannot be hungry for a little bit. And then we let the killing resume? To me, that just felt so inhumane.
And I looked at the Ambassador, Linda Thomas-Greenfield. I said, we continue to say, it’s time for a ceasefire. And then when a ceasefire resolution approaches a security council, we’re providing that sort of diplomatic cover by vetoing those resolutions. And I said, and then I slid over the paper and the picture to the president. He picked it up. He was looking at her picture. He said, I understand. And he said, you do what you got to do. I I understand. So I walked out hoping that we could get some more kind of attention and eyes on Rafah and what was going to happen to Rafah.
And unfortunately, I think I would just encourage anybody to look at a satellite image of Rafah right now and see what happened.
Jeremy (49:01)
No, I know I’ve talked to friends in the administration who for them, and I think like I’ve served in government, was not, I served in the Biden administration, even I wasn’t there when this all happened. I’d left at the end of 2022, but I think it’s not uncommon. I felt this when I worked on Yemen during the Obama years where you’re always conflicted. You don’t fully agree with the policy, but you have a narrative you can tell yourself where you’re still managing to make a difference and it’s better to stay and try to make change from the inside. And everybody, you got to calibrate that differently. I’ve asked myself many times if I’d still been in government when this was happening, what my point would have been. I know for many, many of my friends who were still in the administration, Rafah was the point where they just realized nothing was going to change.
Dr. Thaer (49:45)
Yeah, we met with Samantha power when she was the Administrator of USAID. And I think there was and I’m one of those voices. I’ll be honest with you. I think when they started talking about the port and the USAID was not involved in like any of the discussions, I’m like, I felt like it would have been powerful for somebody like her to have resigned. But like you said, everybody has their own calculations and she’s come out and said exactly what you said.
Jeremy (50:06)
She’s talked about this, and people can watch that and make of it what they will. I think it is genuine. I have a degree of sympathy for that because it is hard when you’re in government. It’s hard to know at what point you’re not useful anymore. Tony Lake, I took a course with Tony Lake who was Clinton’s National Security Advisor but long before that had worked for Henry Kissinger at the NSC in the 70s and he resigned from the NSC under Kissinger. I took a course with him at Georgetown. He explained it and said I just got to a point where I realized that Kissinger was discounting everything I was saying. This is my kind of recollection 20 years later, but he’s written about this. People can read it. And I think that’s the challenge. Are you still making a marginal difference? And it’s not a trivial thing. If you think you still are making some marginal differences, there’s a wrong, I think, incentive to stay in.
But something Ta-Nehisi Coates said recently that I thought really connected to what you achieved with the walkout from the Biden meeting, which he said, look, the Gaza protest movement, it was not going to stop a genocide in the immediate term in the same way that the abolition movement did not immediately stop slavery. Basically you reach the people first and then that later translates into politics and policy. And that really resonated that you didn’t change the president’s mind clearly probably wasn’t possible to change the president’s mind. But you did get a breakthrough of public awareness that I think was really powerful and probably would not have been achieved if you just stayed in that meeting.
Dr. Thaer (51:32)
Yeah, I do agree with you. I don’t think that there was going to be any changing of the president’s mind. And I think everybody makes their own calculations. And I think it’s exactly what you said. For me, it’s important that people are informed and aware and that they’re able to exercise their power through whatever engagement that they’re able to do. That’s, I think, I hope that we’ll see some of these results happen maybe later this year, maybe in the next couple of years, but definitely I hope we see that the people are exercising their right to express themselves.
Jeremy (51:59)
Yeah. And you are beginning to see this now filter into political impact. The vote a couple of weeks ago in the Senate about rejecting some of the weapons transfers to Israel, the vote still failed. The number of senators voting for that, it’s now 80 percent of the Democratic caucus. The number of senators supporting it has more than doubled in the last couple of years. So things are shifting.
Dr. Thaer (52:18)
Jeremy, I saw a vote like that a couple of years ago get eight senators. Yes. And so to be in double digits is saying something and then to be where are at.
Jeremy (52:25)
To be at 40. Amazing.
Dr. Thaer (52:26)
And the other thing that they voted on was the bulldozers. My mother’s home in the suburb of Jerusalem was bulldozed. And to see something like that come through, think it just, I think it should get people realizing that they can have an effect and that their voice does matter.
Jeremy (52:40)
Yeah. What we always end on, question for you, what is one piece of disinformation or misinformation on something you care about that you’d like to correct? Part of the idea of this podcast is to be a counterpoint to a lot of the disinformation out there about displacement and refugee issues.
Dr. Thaer (52:55)
I yeah, for me, I think it relates to the dehumanization of Palestinians. There is an incredible report that just published, I can’t remember the name of the organization that studied this, but they were looking at the BBC. And the BBC is not very different than CNN, I would say in terms of just their coverage. And they looked at something called the deployment of the passive voice when talking about Palestinians who have been killed. This dozen of Palestinians died or, know, affording us, the reader or the audience or the listener, the ability to understand who these people were, not citing names, not talking about if they were a fiance or if they were a parent or if they were a graduate student, if they were wearing a backpack.
These sorts of things I think are important for folks to pick up on because as you cut through so many of these filters, when you start realizing maybe the source of information that I’m looking at is not giving me the accurate picture here. I think that empowers people and it’ll help them understand it better.
Jeremy (53:58)
If the bombs in the headline are being dropped anonymously, something’s wrong.
Dr. Thaer (54:02)
Exactly. That’s the other part of this. I think everybody believes that there should be consequences for actions, right? People should be held accountable. States should be held accountable. But if you’re not naming names, then how can you have any sort of accountability? That’s the purpose of accountability. Identifying who did what, and then, you know, as a result of that, you hope that there can be some remediation or some consequences. so, like, one example is, and you mentioned, Hind Rajab and what happened to her, this six-year-old Palestinian child.
But there was one news anchor in the United States, I still remember this, who said her name, said, Hind Rajab, and then said, of course, Hind Rajab is the Palestinian woman that died in Gaza. And on my mind, I’m like, who on earth would refer to this baby, you know, as a woman? This adult that tragically died?
And I want to say just one last point, if it’s okay with you, is the other thing is as a healthcare worker, but I would encourage all sorts of professionals to also look at their societies and ask if they have not said anything about what’s going on in Palestine, why they have not said anything. What is the reason that we can’t say hospitals and healthcare workers deserve to be safe? You know, deserve to be able to treat people? Why are we not able to say that, hey, this ambulance that was riding in Rafah with the fire truck with their lights on when they were gunned down like the New York Times showed and the video that got coupled with it? Why is the American Medical Association not saying anything about that?
And I think it’s important for us to recognize that being silent on these issues, it’s not the moral thing. Of course, it’s the morally correct thing to speak out. But also it would suggest poor leadership, in my opinion, and maybe we need to change some of that leadership. Just in terms of like misinformation, our professional societies that are supposed to help organize us and advocate for us, they haven’t done a great job when it comes to Palestine and many of the other areas too.
Jeremy (55:49)
Yeah. Dr. Thaer, thank you for joining us today. And more importantly, thank you for your service in crisis zones in Gaza and beyond. Thank you for talking to us about what you experienced and what you saw. And thank you for your leadership.
Dr. Thaer (56:01)
Appreciate it. Thank you, Jeremy.
Jeremy (56:06)
Before we wrap up, here’s a quick rundown of three other stories that we’re tracking this week. While the wars in Iran and Gaza have gotten comparatively more attention, the conflict in Lebanon remains deeply devastating. A couple weeks ago on this program, Vali Nasr talked about the so-called Gaza rules that now seem to guide conflict in the modern age, and we’re seeing the Israeli government apply Gaza rules to southern Lebanon as well.
In fact, the Israeli Minister of Defense has more or less said as much. And the results are just as devastating. Over a million people are now displaced within Lebanon, 66,000 Lebanese have even fled to seek refuge in Syria, which is quite a turnabout when you think of the last 15 years of history there. And things like double tap airstrikes are occurring. There’s some video that came out this week of an apparent Israeli double tap airstrike on Lebanese first responders.
That has been happening with some frequency and it mirrors the kind of tactics that we’ve seen from Putin in Ukraine and we saw from the Assad regime over many years in Syria. And all of that is a big part of the reason why a couple of weeks ago, 40 U.S. senators voted to curtail U.S. arms sales to Israel. There were votes in the Senate to curtail the sale of armored bulldozers and thousand pound bombs to the Israeli government, and 40 US senators voted for one or both of those votes. They didn’t pass, but it represents a high watermark of U.S. congressional concern about military support to the Israeli government. And it’s worth taking a look at how your senator voted because this won’t be the last time that comes up.
In our last episode, we talked about the humanitarian crisis in Sudan and the harmful role that the United Arab Emirates is playing in the conflict. This is getting increased attention and last week we saw some positive congressional action on this issue. The co-chairs of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission in Congress sent letters pressing for U.S. who all have corporate relationships with the UAE, the National Football League, the National Basketball Association, Warner Brothers, and Disney, to reconsider their engagement with the UAE given that country’s hand in the genocide and mass atrocities that its partner, the RSF, is carrying out.
We will drop a link to the Lantos Commission press release and the show notes, and you can find copies of those letters in that press release. If you want to add your voice to the chorus of those who are concerned about the UAE’s role in Sudan, you can go to refugeesinternational.org, find the Take Action tab, and sign two petitions, one telling the NBA to end its partnership with the Emirates, and another calling on your member of Congress to stop US arms sales to the UAE until they stop providing arms to a genocide.
And to wrap things up on a more positive note, we are seeing encouraging pushback on President Trump’s immigration policies now across multiple states. Here at Refugees International, we host a partnership called the Refugee Advocacy Lab, which works to promote welcoming policies for refugees at the state and local level in the U.S. We have seen some great successes in recent state legislative sessions.
In Georgia, the Lab’s local partner secured passage of legislation to create a pathway that would allow internationally trained medical professionals to get licensed and continue working within their field while also filling key health workforce gaps in Georgia. Meanwhile, the legislature there also defeated five bills that would have harmed refugees and immigrants, including by compelling state and local officials to cooperate with ICE and by making it more difficult for refugees to access critical services.
In Virginia, the Lab’s local partners successfully pushed for 14 bills that range from protecting churches, schools, and other sensitive locations from ICE enforcement to making public resources available in multiple languages so that they are more accessible to refugees and immigrants. You can learn more about the work of the Refugee Advocacy Lab at RefugeeAdvocacyLab.org.
Thanks so much for joining us today.Don’t forget to subscribe to Forced From Home on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed the episode, consider donating to support our work at refugeesinternational.org or the link in our show notes. For more, follow Refugees International on Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. And stay tuned for more Forced From Home episodes coming soon.