Ideas - Bearing Witness: Canadian Doctors in Gaza

Episode Date: October 8, 2026

Imagine seeing an atrocity with eyes wide open and then returning to a life that doesn't ask much about it. This is the experience of five Canadian doctors who have been offering urgent medical aid in Gaza for almost three years. But in Gaza, the absence of resources means often all they can do is bear witness. In this podcast, each doctor shares how what they experienced changed their lives.Guests in this episode:Mel Brecknell is a physician specializing in emergency medicine.Rizwan Minhas is a board certified physician in family medicine in Canada and the U.S.Ben Thomson is a Toronto physician working in nephrology, general internal medicine, and public health predominantly in humanitarian work zones.Eman Lubani is a pediatric emergency physician in London, Ontario.Noor Amin is a physician in Ontario practicing sports and exercise medicine.

Pipelines. Alberta wants them. Mark Carney says Canada needs them. Now a new West Coast pipeline has been designated as being in the national interest. Tune in to West of Center with me, Kathleen Petty, to hear what it could mean for Alberta. And what's in it for the rest of the country? The Canadian taxpayer is going to make a lot of money off this pipeline. We'll break it all down and give you some no-nonsense analysis from out West. Find and follow West of Center wherever you get your podcast. This is a CBC podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed.

According to the World Health Organization, the majority of Gaza's hospitals are no longer functioning. Medicine, diagnostic equipment, and fuel veer between unavailable or nearly impossible to access. There's no treatment for cancer patients, no dialysis for kidney disease. More than 64,000 children have been killed or injured since October 23. Gaza now has the highest cohort of child amputees anywhere in the world. For almost three years, Canadian doctors have been traveling to Gaza to offer urgent medical care. But in the absence of medicine and resources, often all they can do is bear witness. In this episode, five Canadian doctors talk about going to Gaza,

about what they saw, heard, and did, and about how it changed their lives. We're calling this episode, Bearing Witness, Canadian Doctors in Gaza. Well, as the night falls and the airstrikes are getting tense into or across the Gaza Strip, We've witnessed in these hours the targeting of residential towers, the targeting of residential homes. It gets worse and worse, the feeling of fear, the feeling of worry among the civilians of Gaza. They do not know what to expect. We just found its whole one body under the rubbles. It spoke to me immediately.

I knew that it was going to be catastrophic. This translates to the children are still under the rebel, Omar, Abdullah and Massa. I realize that the level of experience needed and also that risk aversion to go into a place like Gaza. I knew that I suited the criteria of the kind of person and I had the skills that I thought I could offer. Launching of airstrikes on the Gaza Strip usually gets more intense, as we've witnessed in previous escalations and previous wars. So this is really a feeling of mixed feelings of anxiety, of worry, and in great fear among the civilians of Gaza. It's not as you see, okay? It's not like ice cream trucks for ice cream.

It's ice cream tracks for bodies. The murderers. I'm going to go to jane, because Tohman's when I'm a boy, he's chad. We begin in Gaza where three major hospitals are under siege by Israeli forces. With medical supplies running low and a growing number of people injured, the targeting of health facilities is deepening. Why don't you go with your family south?

And if I go, who treats my patients? We are not animals. We have. the right to receive proper health care. You think I went to medical school and for my postgraduate degrees for a total of 14 years? So I think only about my life and not my patients? I'm asking you, ma'am,

do you think this is the reason I went to mid-school? To think only about my life? As someone who lives and works in Canada, I'm incredibly fortunate to work in a healthcare system that has a bounty of resources. And with the world-class training that I'm lucky enough to have, I think part of the reason I go is I'm obligated to go. There's an acronym that is unique to the Gaza Strip.

And it's W-C-N-S-F. Wounded child, no surviving family. In early 2026, a call went out looking specifically for pediatricians because that was a need in Gaza. And I thought, well, I'm married with three young kids. yeah, that's not going to be me. And I called my husband and he said, hey, did you see the call that went out?

Do you want to go? In Gaza, we could die because of bombing, because of serving, because of eating and drinking, non-healthy food and water, or because of this. Tons and tons and tons of rubbish. Not being able to help in a situation like that,

it does put you, you feel like you're responsible too. It puts a responsibility on you to speak up for the people that you weren't being able to help. An empty shell with human graves. That's how the World Health Organization described the state of Al-Shefa Hospital once Gaza's largest and most advanced medical complex. WHO staff managed to get access to the site and found partially buried bodies and the smell of decomposition. The trauma was consecutive, back-to-back, constant all day in waves. You would hear a bombing and then you know that maybe half hour later people are going to be coming in and they

come in in very unpredictable ways. I was about 16 years old and I was at a very good school, but I was very rebellious and I came across a Time magazine article described. MSAF and I think it was probably the first time that we had really talked about MSF globally. And I read this article and I thought, wow, that looks like a job that I would like to do. So I decided then that I wanted to go into medicine. Yeah, my name is Mel Brecknell. I'm a physician and I specialize in emergency medicine. And I have a special interest in global health and conflict medicine, particularly in.

in active war zones. Yeah, so my name is Rezwan Minhas. I am a board certified physician in family medicine here in Canada and the States. So I've been practicing in Canada for the past five years. I go around the GTA and work in urgent cares, but I have my own practice in Mississauga.

Coming from a Brown family, we only had two options. I know everyone makes fun of this situation, but one of the options was being an engineer, which three of my brothers became, and the fourth brother, one had to become a doctor. I was born a Palestinian refugee. I was born in Kuwait. But that experience and also the experience of seeing my own cousins in refugee camps in Lebanon and in Jordan as well as in the West Bank.

And my parents' own experience, all of that together kind of made me realize that I wanted to be in a position to help people and to give people the kind of aid that I received when I came here. So for me, it's not so much a job as a calling. And it's a very cliched thing to say, but truly that's how I've felt, you know, working in medicine. My name is Iman Lubani. I'm a pediatric emergency physician in London, Ontario. Yeah, my name is Noor Amin. I'm a physician here in Ontario. I practice sports and exercise medicine.

I feel part of when we're in medical school, we learn about the roles of physicians. and part of it includes healing patients, but part of it also includes these are the CanMed roles, you know, advocacy and so on and so forth. And so, and health and human rights and the social determinants of health, this is all part of medicine. I'm not sure why I became a doctor. I had a lot of transitions along the way. I realized that I needed some kind of human contact, some kind of daily interaction where I was, and patient care seemed to be the way to do that. Certainly some of that was a selfish need,

but some of it I think really was actually to serve others. My name is Ben Thompson. I'm a physician working currently in the Toronto area. I do a combination of nephrology, which is kidney-related medicine, as well as general internal medicine, as well as public health, predominantly in humanitarian work zones. I started in medicine 26 years ago. When I started, we didn't think a lot about, or we didn't talk a lot about how you handled this.

You're a physician, it's your job. Deal with it. For me now, when I walk in on a difficult situation, I pray internally. I know that it may not be something that's appropriate for my patient, but I pray, I pray for that patient. I pray for their families and loved ones. And I try to do what is in my capability to ease their suffering as much as I can, knowing that there is no cure. There is no way to take away the suffering.

But I try first to do no harm, to not add to that suffering. And second, to provide solace and comfort wherever I can. My first experience of working outside a resource-rich environment was in Burma. And I arrived in northern part of Burma and I was in a refugee camp where the only other doctor was a local Burmese man who didn't speak a word of English. I spoke no Burmese. And we had one vial of penicillin and about three bandages between us. And I remember thinking to myself, what am I doing here? I have no resources to give.

But I realized then, and again, I was only about 23 or 24, that by being there, by looking at people in the AI, by smiling, by giving some form of comfort to them, I was doing more than if I'd been sitting at home. I've been going to Gaza since about 2013. Even at the beginning, I would qualify, I would say that the majority of hospitals were frequent. short critical medications. You know, in Canada, if a CAT scanner is broken and needs a part,

you'll probably have a service person fix it within two or three days. In Gaza, if you're missing a part, you have to get permission from Israel to get that part in. Oftentimes that permission isn't granted. And then you have to have a service person come in and install it. And maybe that person isn't given permission to come or it's too unsafe for them to travel or for other reasons they can't get there. So the healthcare system in Gaza prior to October 2003 was doing the best they could. People could access basic care for the most part. It wasn't a high level of basic care, but they were doing the best they can. At that time, there were attempts to build

education programs to train their own orthopedic surgeons, family physicians. We had a program that was going to start training kidney doctors before October 2023. When the genocide started, all those plans were put on hold. And so essentially, now what you have is hundreds of health care providers who've been killed, every single hospital has been targeted and bombed. This idea that there's now X number of partially functioning hospitals, it's a farce. Anyone on the ground knows that none of the hospitals are functioning anywhere close to the way that a normal hospital should be functioning, or even the way a hospital was functioning prior to October

2003 in Gaza. What we're looking at is a catastrophe, a man-made catastrophe, between 30 and 40% of the wounded are children, and they're injured by the blast, or they're crushed under the rubble of their own home. The problem is the sheer size of the calamity that has been fallen Gaza. This is completely overwhelmed the health system. When I went in October 2012, I was shocked, taken aback, surprised, because I thought conditions were terrible in Gaza. And of course, because we happened to be there during a bombardment, I saw children who had been targeted by the Israeli army and by weapons that at the time were being field tested

by the Israeli army within the Gaza Strip. And it was very difficult. I remember crying, talking to my parents, parents and just saying, what is going on here? When we were going in through Egypt, we were far less controlled as to what we could take in. So the first time I went in through Egypt, we had 34 boxes of medical supplies, and we were allowed to take that in. And that included food and sleeping bags and things that we needed for our everyday life plus medical supplies and medication to treat people. The irony is that when I went back in April of 2026, when I told people

other physicians and Gazans that, oh, I was here in 2012 and I'm back now, they said, oh, 2012, those were the days. They were so good. Life was so good. We still had homes. We still had buildings. We still had electricity. The irony was that what I had wept for, in 2012 became what people were wishing and pining for in 2026. So when I worked with colleagues, physicians, medical students, residents, the vast majority of the people I worked with were not living in homes. They were living in tents. And so that part was difficult.

I mean, we took these oaths. We put on the white coat and, you know, our profession is to serve. serve patients where there's a need and to step up and help and advocate for them. And that's part of kind of what drove me to go. I'm not Palestinian. I'm not Arab. I don't have any friends or family in Palestine prior to going. But I was, you know, I'm born and raised Canadian.

I'm a physician here. These are my morals. These are my ethics. And I saw that there was a need, so I went. And so it informed me considerably. whatever training they gave you is probably not enough. I don't think there's any training for a situation like this. I believe it is a genocide from what I witnessed myself and from Amnesty International and Doctor Without Borders. But I don't think they train you enough. You have these sessions before

you get in with the World Health Organization. And what they tell you is this is what you do when you're in danger. You just ring us and we will try to get you out of there. By the time I went in last year, we were allowed one suitcase weighing 20 kilos, and we were not allowed to take in anything that was deemed to be a gift or to be used medically for anybody local. So by the time I went in the third and fourth time when these rules were incredibly strict, I knew so many people who were so desperate. Plus, I had friends in Canada, Palestinian friends who had relatives in Gaza, and they were all imploring me,

please could you take my grandfather a pair of shoes? Please could you take in cancer medication for this person? I was getting continual text messages from people in Gaza. My mother has a heart condition. If she doesn't have a medication, she's going to die. And then I had around me piles of medications and clothing. And then a very good friend of mine in Gaza said to me, I said, listen, I'm coming in, what do you need?

And it was the time of the famine. And she said, could you bring in vitamins for my kids? And I said, of course. I'll get vitamins for your kids. And then she said, but could you get them some pringles as well? And just even saying it gives me goosebumps. There's a couple of first moments. The first moments I just got into Gaza, it's burnt into my head.

And the second you get in you hear the drones, they sound like a lawnmower. And they don't stop. for the entire couple of weeks that it was there until you leave. So just hearing the drones overhead the entire time, the first experience of seeing Gaza, and then driving through the dark to the hospital where we were going. And as we were pulling into the hospital, it was nighttime, so I couldn't see much.

But you'd get wafts of a terrible smell from time to time. You could smell the smell of burning, I think from munitions or whatever that I don't have experience with bombs. Bombing smells before, but the type of a burning smell that you haven't smelled before, the smell of raw sewage. And then you just see people everywhere. As you start getting closer to the hospital, many people converged around the hospital because they felt that that was. the safest place potentially for them to be. And then you go into the hospital, there's some lights and you just see hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people

just sitting or laying all over the hospital. Then people running in, bringing in people in waves. When I was there, I thought, you know, this is the worst day ever, I could ever imagine. And then the next day was the worst day ever that I could ever imagine. And then the next day.

When I got there on my time in April, what happened was that we were at the border and one of our Canadian workers by the name of Jacob Lickinger. He was working for World Central Aid Kitchen. I believe he was 33 years old. He had a wife and kid who he had left behind as well just to supply

food to the people in Gaza. So at the border, when he went to the hospitals or wherever he was going to the World Center aid shelter, he was bombed. Right. So at that moment, I realized anything can happen, right? You don't realize that you can die as well until you get there yourself. That's what I'm trying to say. Because when, okay, this is going to sound crazy, but we thought being an ex-Canadian military and then he had a couple of British military, personnel, we thought they were the most safest people there. We're like, okay, these guys are here, you know, we should be good. But there were the people who ended up getting a drone attack to their individual

buses a few kilometers ahead of us. So we're like, if these people aren't safe, then none of us is safe. So that, when you see that in person, we're like, should we continue the mission? Should we abort the mission? But I think the consensus was, let's continue our mission and we'll see what happens. So it changes the whole look The fact that you yourself can die over there Now when you get there and see the patients

How is it different from your phone? It's different because now you can smell the blood It's not it's hard talking about it Because when you see it in person You can smell the blood You can hear the screams And you can't tone it down right And there's one thing hearing screams

Of of patients You know we're told to keep it within ourselves we suppress it as physician so we can focus on our tasks, but it's hard to suppress it when you have a child holding onto your legs and they're like passing out because of the amount of blood they're losing. And when you smell the blood and you hear their parents burning their kids next to you because, again, you know the child that was alive a few seconds ago is now down on the ground

because of the amount of blood they lost. So it's different because when you see it on the screen, but when you can see it in person but now you can smell it, And now you can experience the grief that comes along with it, just different. Surreal. It was surreal. It was so much worse than what I thought it would be. I had prepared myself when I left in April of 2026.

When I left to go to Gaza, I'd prepared myself for the destruction, the physical destruction, the destruction of buildings, but also for the human destruction, you know, the orphans that I would see, those who were the amputees that I would say. I thought I had prepared myself, but I was unprepared. It got progressively worse. We'd cross from, so at the end, the last three missions, we had to come in through Jordan because we couldn't cross from Egypt anymore. So we got in, we crossed the Jordanian borders, and then we're picked up by a bus,

controlled by the Israelis, and they say to you, there's no stopping. We're not going to stop this bus, and we had a police escort. So it was all sort of like, go to the bathroom now because you don't know when your next going to go to the bathroom. And the 130 kilometers from Amman to Gaza was taking up to 10 hours at times. So it's an incredibly long, hot journey. And then we would arrive at the crossing. And what happened in the past were there would be UN vehicles there to meet us that were armored vehicles. But for some reason, they decided now that the UN vehicles couldn't park where we were going to be dropped off.

So we then had to carry our luggage. The last time it was dark, it was hot and dusty, and we had to walk up this dirt trail, and it was uphill carrying our very heavy, not quite so 20 kilos, because we all took far more carrying it. And all we could see in the dust was soldiers standing there with guns just staring at us. and then eventually we got to the end of that sort of walk, which was almost a kilometre in the heat, and then we got onto the vehicles, and then we're taken to our guest houses. And at the end, my last mission, there was nothing.

It was raised to the ground. So previously, you would see blown up buildings everywhere, just destroyed buildings. And it wasn't just pockets. It's the entirety. There is the occasional odd building that's still standing, It looks like a sort of snaggle tooth. But the last time, it was just flat.

It was just sand and rubble. There was nothing left. I had gotten through all of the hurdles. I had gotten to the border. I'd gotten the United Nations approval and then the initial Israeli Army approval. And then I was on the border and I was held up. They held the entire United Nations bus, two buses up, two hours, three hours for me and two other physician and a nurse, two other health care. care workers. The physician and the nurse were turned back because they had spoken out against

the genocide publicly. They're Australians. I found myself grovelling. I was, I was pulled aside and interrogated, asked why I was entering, told them I'm a physician, I want to help. and then basically told, you know, we're not really sure you sound fishy. So they had me sit there. And then finally, this young woman, she couldn't have been more than in her mid-20s. One of the people who had interrogated me came out and said, we'll let you go. We think you're, we don't think you're a bad person. And I cried and I thanked her.

And I felt this queasiness in my gut. I'm thanking this woman who holds so much power, power beyond her age, beyond her stage in life, so much power over my ability to enter and try to provide some, what, medical relief? That's what's threatening here. That's what it was difficult. I felt like a sellout. But I cried and I thanked her. I went in April 1st, 2024.

I was denied twice on December 16th and 18 of 2025 through the Jordan Allen by bridge going into Israel. When you try to go there, you apply to get in and you're approved. It's not like we get up and we decide to just go there ourselves. We actually apply and we get approved by Israeli Kogat forces. And they basically said, Dr. Menas, you know, you can come in and try to do your work here in Palestine, Gaza specifically, but when you get to the border, there's not only immigration officers present. You have IDF soldiers present as well. And from what I remember, the ages,

you can't really, I'm just guessing, but probably from the ages of 18 to 22, 23, and they're responsible for who gets in and who does not get in. And for some reason, they, I don't know if they have a quota they have to meet, but they denied four of us. And the reasons were as specific. I didn't really argue much because I didn't want the rest of my team who were getting in to get affected. So four of us got in, four of us didn't get in. And then I stayed quiet, but then we applied again. And two days later, we were allowed to go to the border again to get into Palestinian Gaza and we were denied again. And there was no reason. Basically he said, it's so shocking. So I said, and, you know, I'm just a physician.

I'm just here to do my work. Can you please take the ibuprofen, take anything you don't like in my bag? And it was only to see empty syringes for 14 days that I was going for. So I said, just take it and let us go. And he's like, I don't know, you might even have a rocket in your bag. And then I said, no, man, we're physicians. We don't really carry rockets in our bags. We actually carry medical supplies for the work that we're going to do.

And trust me, you can search all my bags. But he did say those words specifically with ibuprofen, no life-saving medications allowed. And believe me or not, ibuprofen is not life-saving. And I told him we don't have any life-saving medications. But then I'm like, why am I saying we don't have life-saving medications? Isn't our purpose to go there and save lives? So that's where the helplessness comes in. Like, you want to help, but there's so much against you from helping, you know.

I believe we could have the resources. and it's just a humanitarian reason why we're being denied resources. Like we, when I say we, I mean humans. Like, we are our own enemies in this case. Dr. Rizwanmanhasse, a physician of 12 years, is a Canadian doctor who spent time providing medical care in Gaza. In this episode, we hear from five doctors about their work, what they witnessed, and what compelled them

to practice in one of the most dangerous. places on Earth. This is Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. Have you ever heard of that show, The Americans? Well, there's a Canadian court case that actually inspired that spy series. I'm Phelan Johnson, and I host See You in Court, a podcast about the cases that changed Canada. This week, we dive into the story of a Toronto-born teenager named Alex. He saw his life shattered when his parents were revealed to be, yes, Russian spies.

His family, his identity were all a lie. And before long, he was thrust into a legal battle to win at least one truth back. Check out Alex's quest to remain Canadian this week on See You in Court. Available wherever you get your podcasts. I mean, we talk about there being two functional dialysis units or, you know, 400 patients versus 800 patients. And I don't think that really encapsulates really the deficiencies. One of the patients I saw in March, I saw in a clinic, in Rafa. And at that time, Rafa was not completely destroyed. It was destroyed a few months later.

But I was in a health clinic in Rafa. And I was managing the urgent care center, which is small. It had three beds. But a mother brought her daughter in, very young, and was concerned because the child wasn't needing. and it was very clear that the child was smaller than the child should be for her age. And I examined the child, and it was obvious the child had a very enlarged liver and spleen. I actually had an ultrasound that I had brought with me from Canada, and I confirmed that there was a very enlarged liver and spleen. My concern with the limited blood work I could do in the clinic was that the patient almost certainly had some kind of blood. disorder like a leukemia or a lymphoma. And at that point I thought about what I would do in Canada.

In Canada, this would be a simple solution. I would call a blood specialist. They would do a bone marrow biopsy. They would do a cat scan. They would identify the diagnosis, probably within a day or two, and they would start chemotherapy. At that point in March, 2004, none of those things were possible. So there were no cat scanners that were functioning at the time. Okay. There were at 1.3 MRI machines in Gaza, but one of them was at Shifa Hospital, which had been bombed and was inaccessible. One of them was at the Turkish Friendship Hospital, which was inaccessible because it had been converted into an Israeli military post. And the third one was broken.

So there was no way I could do imaging on this child. Even if I said, well, I can feel the lymph node, I can just do a biopsy, we'll get a diagnosis that way. Yes, I could have done a biopsy, but the two pathologists in Gaza who could have read that biopsy had both been killed. So there was no way to get a diagnosis for this small girl. None. And even if we had a diagnosis, where would she have gone for chemotherapy? The only place where chemotherapy could have been done prior to October 2023 was the Rentee's. hospital or the Nassar Hospital, both of which were inaccessible, and both of which had suspended chemotherapy because none of the drugs were failable.

Adults, prior to October of 2023, received their chemotherapy at Turkish Friendship Hospital, which was inaccessible and destroyed. So you have someone who has a readily treatable diagnosis, a young child, and all of the mechanisms with which we could have diagnosed and managed and treated and saved this girl. We're gone. Gone. Nothing. I don't know what happened to her.

I would like to think that she managed to get out of Gaza, but we know from the data that the World Health Organization has provided that many, many, many, many people die while waiting to be transferred out of Gaza. And there's a very good chance she was won. Because when you're scrolling, like you see the stuff in 10 or 20-second snippets. but I think when you're there you're seeing the before, you're seeing the after you're smelling it okay

it's different because you're you know like when a kid is grabbing onto you you're grabbing your shirt and so you just experience it in a different

way and then they kind of let go because they're dead. Like the terror in their eyes, when they're looking at you screaming, and then the look in their eye when they realize that their limb is gone, like you're there with them and you realize that they don't realize that their leg is gone. And then you see the look on their face,

they realize that their limb, is missing or like a child that just stops talking. You see them for days, day after day after day, just staring at like a corner, those types of experiences made one day or something other. And when I went to the ICU, I just can't forget because there was this girl, yeah, so she was, I believe, four and a half years. years old. She was had a chest tube and she had a, she had a breathing machine. And I could just see her that she was in pain. And when someone's in pain, you get an IV pain medicine. But because of a

lack of IV pain medication, she would always like, she would always like, I believe, like move in bed with pain or like tremble in bed because she was in pain. And then I was thinking, like, do we give this child time with this breathing tube and let her suffer in pain? Or should we just pull the plug? Like who, where are her parents, right? That was the first day I remember. And I was like thinking where her parents was. And then I look at her chart and it's saying WCNSF, wounded child, no surviving family. And then, so then you have to decide, right? Do you, like, the child has no parent to decide who, what we should do with her life? Should we hope for a pain? medicine to arrive on time the next day or the next day and should we hope for the best or should we just

pull the plug and I was talking to ICU team and like you know the child is in pain what do you guys have in plan? They're just hoping we get the medicines that we need to secure her and so I can't forget that day it was the first day we had so every day I would go there just to like sit down with her she was obviously not responsive but then I was just hoping and praying that we could bring the medicine. And you know what? surprising the medicine did come, but it was late. She ended up passing away. These physicians, there's been hundreds of healthcare workers that have been killed. The people who are there now working in the emergency rooms in the clinics, they're exhausted. They're exhausted. They're tired. They're often demoralized. And seeing someone from outside who's there to support them,

even if it means that I come and work in the emergency room for a few hours and they can go and get some rest before they come back to work, or they can go to the tent where their family is and see their family for a few hours before they come back. That's important too. I thought I would be working perhaps clinically with the physicians there, maybe some teaching because I am involved in undergraduate medical education here and I also do some teaching with residents as well. essentially I thought I would be helping in some meaningful way. I hoped I would be helping in some meaningful way. The truth was that the physicians in Gaza did not need my clinical expertise.

They taught me a lot. There were, so for instance, starvation, you know, the approach to a starving child, the approach to how to refeed a starving child. How do you take medications or equipment that is falling apart and make it do something else because you don't have any other options? How do you make the best of infrastructure that's crumbling around you, a hospital that's literally falling apart? These are things that I was taught. The biggest help that when I'd ask physicians there, I said, do you want me to do? Like, what can I do here? They said, carry the message of what is

happening here to the outside, because there are no reporters, there are no journalists allowed in. So we, as medical personnel, we became the de facto journalists in many ways. And so carry that message out to the outside world. I very quickly realized that one of the reasons, or the main reason I was there, was to bear witness to what was going on. And all the people that I spoke to there, all of them, just said, please, just share and tell people about us. So then that became part of my motivation because a lot of the care there wasn't very highly sophisticated

because there's no resources and you're basically doing first aid. You don't have the fancy vents and the fancy drugs and the fancy antibiotics that you can titrate this dosage of that dosage or do this procedure or that procedure. So it's somewhat crude in that sense. But I still found it worthwhile. I definitely feel like I got a lot more than I was able to do. You do feel useless in many ways. every single day we had a sheet of paper where we would say how many people were died, how many people had gastrointestinal infections, how many people had an amputees, how many surgeries

we had. And this paper was given to one doctor, in this case it was me. And for other hospitals, it was other doctors. And we were recorded and we would submit it every single day. And the numbers were, during mass casualty events, you would find numbers anywhere from 10 to 20 children who were being killed. with gunshot wounds and we would write gunshot wounds

to the head and we would submit that to the ICJ and to the World Health Organization you're like what's the point of doing this why don't we just end this isn't one paper enough? Why do we have three years of papers being submitted like who is looking at this and if you're looking at it

why aren't you ending this? I don't know it's very odd it's very odd it doesn't make any sense I know there is probably I don't want to get into politics I never do I just advocate for patients and other physicians around the world. But I feel like we're not being told the truth. Especially when you go there, you come and look at the news there.

I'm like, what? Why don't you report on exactly what's happening there? Leaving was the most strangest thing. The whole experience was very almost unbelievable. I couldn't believe it was real. And then leaving was a whole other mission. we were trying to leave and then there was bombing and so our little bus had to take a detour and go another way and then the tire blew out and so we're on the road I wish I could show you some of my pictures we're on the road trying to change the tire little kids came out to try to help us and then we get to this one area we get on another bus that's going to take us to another bus and as I'm sitting on this bus before I get to that So, you know, last day in the hospital, I almost felt like I couldn't really make eye contact with my other colleagues because I'm about to leave them and I have the privilege of leaving.

I have the privilege of coming in and then leaving and they're stuck in this terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible horror of a situation. But, you know, they all kind of said, you know, don't forget us. you know, we want you to be happy just because we can't have this. We don't want you not to have that. So, Thieving was difficult. And then as I'm sitting on the bus, I see a bunch of people that look like local Palestinians outside of the bus. And I see that there's some people on the bus that are just sobbing uncontrollably. And then I realize that these are the few people that are going to be getting out.

and that's their other remaining family members, and they're saying their final goodbyes. So on the bus with me, there were some young kids and their mothers, and on the outside I saw mostly men and whoever was remaining of their family. And I realized that this is them kind of saying their, what they think may be their final goodbye,

because the next day they could be, you know, bombed. And that was a terrible thing to have to witness families being ripped apart in real time. And it just wasn't even expecting it. I thought I was just, hey, like, waiting on this bus because now we're going to go across. So, yeah, even leaving was very difficult in different ways. In many ways, I didn't want to leave either. I wished I could just bring my family and my world to Palestine or take everyone with me, but they wanted to stay there.

They just wanted it to be a better place. For some reason, while I was there, I did feel a certain sense of being at ease, which isn't the right word, because you're not at ease. Your body's vibrating from the bombs, but being with, the people really made you feel okay. I've been doing humanitarian work now for over a decade, and I can say that I've never, except in Gaza, most recently, had a sense of feeling futile.

And that sense of futility was honestly heartbreaking to me, because physicians can't end a genocide. We can't. That needs political action. And so when you go and you have skills that require you to say, oh, if you had this medication, you could be cured of this condition. Or if you could get this procedure that is readily available in September 20203 in this very hospital,

and we have a person who's right here and can do it right now, but we can't because this $3 part wasn't allowed in. You know, it's demoralizing. And the solutions to that are not having more physicians come. The solutions to that are political. And that's not something that as physicians were equipped to do. That's something that we rely on our politicians. and that's why so many of us have come back and said,

no, our role is not to just go and provide care. We have to come back and we have to be loud and advocate for patients there whose solutions are not us going back, but political solutions. What really kind of, I guess, shocks me is how medical associations and institutions who claim to have these values and have these morals and have these ethics that taught those values and morals and ethics. that taught those values and morals and ethics are the same ones that are failing to say anything or hide behind the fallacy of neutrality when there's a genocide happening in real time.

It's just cowardly, it's disgusting. And a lot of it is, you know, my experience going and coming back is given me a lot of clarity because I see the masks have come off. And you realize that at times you're walking amongst monsters, as one of my colleagues said. But in a certain way, I'm glad I can see that now. You know where people stand. It was difficult.

I found I was angry a lot. There was grief, but it manifested as rage and anger. Because of the injustice of it all. Why is it that my child? who are half Palestinian, half Indian, why is it that my children can get the medications they need, the equipment that they need, and these other Palestinian children could not? What made my children myself, any of us, what makes any of us special? And them condemned. It was difficult.

as a rational thinking, feeling human being, it was difficult because this is a human-made disaster. This is not some act of God, you know, a typhoon, a tsunami, no. And my own government was allowing this, is allowing this to happen. I had a really hard time with that. I am Palestinian. The fact that I am not in the Gaza Strip, that when my parents left during Anneqba, the great catastrophe of 1948, when their families left, they didn't end up in the Gaza Strip because 200,000 Palestinians took refuge in the Gaza Strip. I could have been one of them. My family could have been among those Palestinians.

And so I could be stuck in Gaza now with my children. What is it that makes me a human being who counts, who matters when I have a Canadian past? passport, but that same person, everything about me would be the same. No Canadian passport. I would no longer count if I were in Gaza. Why? My children would no longer count. That ate me up. I didn't know how to live with that. In September of 2003, as part of the teaching at the Islamic University of Gaza that I do every year, there's a graduation ceremony. And so part of that graduation ceremony, I got to sit as a faculty presenter, teacher, I got to sit in the very front row of the graduation. And I remember sitting in that front row to my left was Dr. Omar Faruana and his wife. His wife was an obstetrician gynecologist.

Omar Frawana as well was a physician. In fact, was at one point the dean of the medical school there. the current dean, Dr. Anwar, had actually just taken over the medical school from Dr. Fadl Naim, who's a good friend of mine as well. And since that meeting, the president of the university, who in fact had done some training at the University of Toronto, he was sitting to my right in that graduation ceremony and he was killed with members of the family soon after that graduation. Omar Frawana was actually one of the first physicians killed in Gaza with his wife actually, who was also sitting close to me. Fadl Naim has had multiple sons killed. And Dr. Anwar has also had multiple family members killed, including children.

So every single one of those people's lives has been at points destroyed by this. And that's what it's doing. It's just, it's absolutely destroying the lives of people there. Everybody, everybody there has been affected by this. I talk about a couple people, but it's everybody there has been affected. There's been entire families that have been destroyed. You know, that's what a genocide looks like. That's what's been happening in the last thousand days plus.

I did not make a difference by going. I'm hoping that speaking out will make a difference. My physical presence there as a person as Eman did not make a difference. but I'm hoping that the fact that I was there, the fact that I can now, there's a credibility lent to the fact that I'm a physician and that I was in Gaza, that that in and of itself speaking out about that,

that I hope will make a difference. I don't think I made much of a difference. I just feel like I learned the truth in a way. In order to truly help them, there should be open borders for, for medical aid, medical equipment, and medications, and even physicians. Yes, I might have affected a few lives here and there, but I don't even know if the patients I saw are still alive or not.

You know, sometimes we feel like we lose hope or feel hopeless or despair. The people there still have hope. You know, sometimes here we feel exhausted and tired. But, you know, as one of my colleagues who went there, he said, you know, they have the right to be exhausted. don't really have that right. And yet they have so much hope as well. Like I still remember this little child.

Her name was Batul outside of Al-Axa hospital. Little kid, I don't know how old she was. She didn't speak English. She made a kite out of some sticks and I think I kept torn up garbage bag. And despite being barefoot, homeless, and with bombs going around, and with bombs going around, in the rubble. She and a few of her friends would run back and forth in front of the hospital with this little kite that they made.

It never actually made it off the ground. It would mostly just drag behind them. But they would laugh and they would enjoy. And you could see the hope that they had. And really, my hope is one day that, you know, that kite will fly. And those kids and all those individuals who were being brutally, brutally treated right now one day, their kite will fly and they will get that freedom that they need one day, that they deserve one day.

And so it gives you that hope as well. And if they're still having hope, how are we not? That was Dr. Nur Amin, concluding this episode of ideas titled Bearing Witness, Canadian Doctors in Gaza. Thank you to all of our guests. My name is Mel Brecknell. I'm a physician and I specialize in emergency medicine. My name is Rezwan Minhas. I am a board-certified physician in medicine here in Canada and the States. My name is Iman Lubani. I'm a pediatric emergency physician in London, Ontario.

My name is Noor Amin. I'm a physician here in Ontario. I practice sports and exercise medicine. My name is Ben Thompson. I'm a physician working currently in the Toronto area. I do a combination of nephrology as well as general internal medicine. as well as public health. This episode was produced by Nahid Mustafa. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Technical production, Danielle Duval. The senior producer is Nicola Luxchich.

Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas. And I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts.