Piers Morgan Uncensored - “Gazan Doctors Are Not Eating”: British Doctor In Gaza

Episode Date: May 1, 2024

Piers Morgan Uncensored is joined by NHS surgeon Dr Junaid Sultan. After working in Britain for over 20 years, Dr Sultan made the agonising decision to help the sick and wounded in Gaza; despite being inundated with messages telling him not to go. He describes the situation in Palestine as ‘absolutely heartbreaking’ and ‘total carnage’, speaking about a breakdown of basic food and medical supplies to Piers Morgan. He challenges US President Joe Biden, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and even Piers himself to come and see what is happening at his hospital in Rafah, claiming the conflict between Israel and Hamas is the worst for health workers since the Second World War. YouTube: @PiersMorganUncensored X: @PiersUncensored TikTok: @piersmorganuncensored Insta: @piersmorganuncensored Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When you paint a sort of apocalyptic picture here of hundreds and hundreds of people every day coming in, many of them children, screaming in pain, needing amputations, just total endless agony and torment. What was the sound like in this hospital? You can't even hear at times. It has a bed capacity of something like 400 beds, nearly 3,000 plus? Tens of thousands of people. And they have no way to be properly treated. Exactly. How many people were coming in every day either dying or severely.

on average more than 500. Every day? Every day. How do they make you feel? I think about it. It makes me to cry. This kid, his legs were completely mangled and there was nothing that we could have done. And he was not having even any painkillers

to keep him comfortable at that. The patient is staying there, the whole family is staying. Because that bed has become the home of that, basically, family. Does it nowhere else to go? No, where else to go. Did you see any Hamas in the hospital? Is that your message for Prime Minister Sunak and President Biden? I invite them to come with me.

I literally invite all of them. I even invite you today, Pierce. Come with me and we let's go together and we just look at what are the ground facts and we see them together. Well, many of the debates we host on this show are quite rightly about the politics and moral arguments surrounding a conflict that simmered for decades. It's easy to forget that the big picture is in fact made up of literally thousands of individual stories, of trauma, suffering and heroism and grief. My next guest has seen many of them firsthand,

British surgeon, Dr. Dunedade Sultan. He just returned from Gaza. He worked at the last properly functioning hospital in the region, which is now overwhelmed. And Dr. Duned has come to the studio today to talk about this with me. Doctor, thank you very much for coming in. You wanted to come in and do his face-to-face

so that I would really understand what you experienced when you were in Gaza for two weeks. You just got back. it's hard to imagine what the actual horror is like when you're just watching from afar. What was it like for you? Thank you so much for having me, peers. It's absolutely heartbreaking and devastating.

Something which I would not like anyone to go through or to be just even face it. You've been a doctor in this country for over 20 years. Correct. In cardiovascular, I think is... I'm a vascular surgeon. A vascular surgeon. And you were approached by an American.

American nonprofit organization, the Fagile Scientific, which aims not just to treat patients, but also to rebuild Gaza's healthcare system, bringing medical supplies and so on. When you were first approached to go there, obviously it's an incredibly dangerous place to be right now for anyone, for journalists, for medical staff, obviously for civilians. Did you have any qualms about going? First of all, I got a lot of messages, a lot of opinions, and I was being told that it's literally like a suicide mission and not to go purely because of the sensitivity and a lot of other issues related to it. But when I read the report, which was by the Washington Post,

and which explained that since the end of the World War II, basically in this conflict, the healthcare facilities and the healthcare workers have been affected the most since in any other conflict. And then I had one of actually a colleague, which is part of the trust, and his father was being hit with a gunshot wound in his head. And he was, literally dying and there was nowhere he was able to get help from. And he even then appealed to the missions that can somebody go and take a neurosurgeon with them and who can go and treat my father. So there were just some personal stories and effect which really made me feel that on a humanitarian level, I have to go. I have to basically be the ambassador of the humanity and I have to help those

people. I mean, it's an amazingly selfless thing that you did. When you first got there, what did you find? Something which is very difficult to put it in world. It is a completely different alienating kind of a world right now. So first of all, you know, you enter and the sound, the sound of the drones which is completely non-stopping and which could be so irritating that you find it difficult to even hear to and talk to each other. And this is like 24-7, it never stops. Then after the sunset, it's a complete pitch black outside, no electricity, no water supply,

no gas supply, something which you have never experienced before. And then the constant sound of the bombs, gunfires, which makes you very scared or which makes you feel like very, very in a strange environment. And then when I walked into the hospital, that was just like a shock. Where exactly is the hospital? So the hospital, if you know that now, Rafa is the last kind of area which has not been invaded yet. So this hospital is at the border between Raffa and Khan Yunus.

So it has got a quite heavy load both from the Raffa and from the Khan Yunus itself. So when we have to travel to it. So you had to go through the different parts of the kind of, you know, Gaza. So we saw the devastation, which was on the roads itself, the destruction of the houses, buildings, and the infrastructure. Was it worse than you imagined, though? Much way worse. Like, first of all, the destruction itself of the buildings and houses and everything.

And then there was literally like a camp on every other street. You just look everywhere around and there are like tent after tent. Like, there is a kind of, you know, it just looks like that, like everyone is just in the tents living there. And you just find it difficult to even move around. And when I moved into the hospital and it was a complete shock because even within the hospital itself, on the outside premises, there were so many tents. And then within the hospital on the corridors, literally there are tents on the both sides of the corridor, hardly a small space to even walk through to get to any clinical area. And which has a huge impact on the hospital kind of Australia, hospital work, hospital ethics and protocol, everything.

How many people were coming in every day either dying or severely wounded? If you walk into the ANE, like it looks like you have come into some sort of, you know, like you see some sort of a market where nobody can even hear anything and everyone is screaming. On average, more than 500. Every day? Every day. Like even more at times. New amounts of people coming in?

New kind of, you know. And one of the reason is that I want to highlight because the European Hospital has a struggle right now. It is receiving, it's the last functioning hospital. So the working situation has completely changed. It is receiving three different types of patients right now. So the first type is the one which is the direct impact of the warfare, which are like gunshots, bombs, burns, sharpnels, all these sort of direct injuries.

Then the second stream of patient, which is a huge burden on the hospital, are the complex patients who have got complication. Because in the last six months, the patients who had all the injuries, they, like, say, you know, because there is no other hospital where to go. For example, if somebody was treated Al-Nasir or Al-Shifa, they've been destroyed. They had no follow-ups. They had big surgeries and they have just gone somewhere in the community.

no antibiotics, no painkillers. They have got wound infection, lots of complications, and they will be... We know 100,000 people, I think, have been wounded. Absolutely. So there are tens of thousands of people. And they have nowhere to go. Exactly. And they keep coming back.

And then the third, you know, day-to-day routine patients. I give you an example. I'm a vascular surgeon. I deal with diabetic patients. So I'm just giving you just an example from them. So diabetic patient, for example, you know, something, a diabetic patient gets an infection in the foot and which can be treated remotely in the community by a GP,

by one week of antibiotics. And these patients literally, because they can't be seen anywhere, no antibiotics in time, they are presenting with flesh-hating bacteria, necrotizing fasciitis. And I had to do importations like above-kne or below-knee, just for that one small thing, which could have been treated by one-week kind of, you know, course of antibiotics.

And this is a huge number. Renal patients, cancer patients, immunocompromise patients, you name it any chronic illness. And these patients are being just like crazy, right, left here and there. It sounds like total carnage. carnage chaos. Have you ever seen anything like you? Nothing, nothing like that. What impact did it

have on you? Difficult to put it in words. Very difficult. You're a Muslim man. Yes. You know, I don't want to get into the politics because you don't want to and I completely understand that. I respect that. Thank you. But as a Muslim man to be there right in the middle of all this and seeing so many Muslims, innocent civilians, putting aside, the mass part of this, but so many innocent civilians getting caught up in it. How do they make you feel? Extremely vulnerable and bad

because I don't have any explanation. I was not even able to answer to them because a lot of them had questions in their eyes, like why, what's the reason and what's going on? And I was not able to explain all that. So I rather came back with a lot of questions in my head as well that why, what's the reason, what's the explanation? It makes you very uncomfortable.

But something, you know, which I feel like this is a question to be put to everyone in the world. That why? There was a 10-year-old boy called Yassine Al-Galban. He was a victim of the bombardment, had multiple injuries. You said you can see both of his feet were completely mangled, hanging on by a small amount of tissue. Again, tremendous pain, but no painkillers. And when he arrived, you had no solution to offer him amputation, which one of your colleagues did to save his life. and when you saw that 10-year-old

you talked about you can't get him out of your head I still feel so uncomfortable and literally I think about it it makes me to cry and basically kind of even know this kid has like I don't know if you can show those pictures last you know his legs were completely mangled

and there was nothing that we could have done and he was not having even any painkillers to keep him comfortable at that time. And I don't know if you look at those pictures, it also highlights the lack of equipment and other supplies because the paramedics, when they brought him, they didn't even had the proper tourniquet to stop the bleeding going on from his legs. So what they did was, you know, the follis catheter,

which you put in people to help with the urine, kind of, you know, drainage. They literally use that and put around the syringes to help to. And the reason that that's so dangerous in kind of, you know, all the medics who would be listening to me, because that can cause more damage, you know, where I could have done the, or my colleagues could have done the impotation, you know, it end up causing more damage to the tissue, and they end up needing unnecessarily more higher level of imputation.

And then as a result of that, you know, the morbidity effect on that. So these are just pictures which just question you. Is there any anesthesia for this? So anesthesia is another big issue, kind of, you know. So at times, kind of, you know, it was a lack of that because there is so much shortage of the medical supplies, which includes anesthetic medications, antibiotics, painkillers. You know, when we were going on the warden to see complex wounds,

patients had wounds like shark bites, and they had no painkillers. You know, you touch them and they were screaming. This little boy? This little. Yeah, exactly. Did he have anesthesia? So very little.

And yet he was having a leg amputated. Yes. It's horrific. It's horrific. There were so many examples after example kind of, you know. How many were children under 18, say? Loads. It's half the population is.

Half of the population is. So every day when you go to the end, you will see like lots and lots of children and women coming there. And you will question that why. With what kind of injuries? So firearm, like direct gunshot wounds, and those gunshot wounds were most commonly in their legs, around the blood vessels,

then around their arms, around the blood vessels in the neck area, and there was one, another very atypical around the spine, close to the spine. So these were the four most common injuries. Then blast injuries and blast injuries, and the blast injuries were the most horrible one. because not only it completely shatters their kind of, you know, bones in the lower limbs, but then a lot of sharpnel injuries due to that.

These sharpness, they were very, very strange. Like, they had very, like, they were very difficult to take out because they had very coarse sort of, you know, edges which go and just get incorporated into the tissues. Very small, but they cause so much damage. And in the chest, abdomen, neck, anywhere. Apparently, at least 500 medical staff have been killed. That is correct. That's the start of us.

And that is like so much kind of, you know, shortage of the working staff members kind of, you know, and they are struggling. And those who are remaining, they are literally working kind of a 24-7. With no break. With no break. And they have also been asked to evacuate and leave.

And that's one of the other adding factor as well. So they are scared for their lives and their family's life. So numerous factors adding up to the situation to make it more complex. Do they even have hurt? to go back to these stuff? No, so all of them are actually staying as a refugee in the hospital or in the tents outside the hospital. When you paint a sort of apocalyptic picture here of hundreds and hundreds of people every day coming in, many of them children, screaming in pain, needing amputations, needing all sorts of stuff, and there's very little anesthesia or painkillers,

just total endless agony and torment. What was the sound like in this hospital? You can't even hear at times. at times because one of the problems is that there are so many refugees which are staying in the hospital people have come into the hospital in the hope that probably they are safe and the corridors are full and it becomes very difficult even to and then the screams of the patients because normally you know this hospital I don't think so it's not a very big

size hospital compared to Shifa or the Al Nasser it has a bad capacity of something like 400 beds but right now there are about kind of you know nearly 3,000 plus like about five to six times the capacity capacity of them. So in a small clinical bay, normally where it should be one patient only. So it has been filled with like three to four patients. And not only that the patient is staying there, the whole family is staying there. Because that bed has become the home of that, basically, family. Because there's nowhere else to go? No. No, nowhere else to go. Did you see any Hamas in the hospital? No, we didn't see anyone like that. So these are just patients? These are just patients, civilians, like, helpless people. How many are dying a day? A lot, many casualties. I mean, hundreds a day? Could be, yes. I can't put a number, but many.

Many. Because one of the other issue is that which you don't realize, actually, the level of the injury is so bad that which come right in the epicenter of bumping or stuff, most often actually they don't even survive. They literally arrive dead on scene. I mean, I can't even imagine what this must have been like for you. Has it had an impact?

I mean, are you able to sleep since you got back? It's very difficult and it's something which really hits you every day and I find it very difficult. Do you have nightmares about it? Yes, but when I think about it, it makes me go into kind of, you know, think it in two ways. Either I let it get to me too much and it affects me or I just become their voice and that's why I have chosen to come and just kind of, you know, raise an awareness for them. What do you want people to do? Putting aside all the politics and the arguments about the merits of the war and so on, I've debated that enough with so many people.

Just purely from a doctor's perspective about what you've seen there, what would you like the world to be doing, and in particular the UK, given we're talking here? I would like to ask for three helps from people, kind of, you know. First of all, they need lots and lots of humanitarian aid. So I want the humanitarian corridor to be really kind of, you know, be effective, effective in the sense that not only medical supplies, food, water, because there is a huge lack of all of these things.

So they need help. And the situation is so bad that even get a clean glass of water is like a commodity. So they need help in terms of all the medical... Did you see evidence of famine as well because that's been reported? Yes, and I shared some of the pictures with you

and all the doctors and nurses literally you can see like they're kind of, you know, like bones. Like they're not eating kind of, you know. That's just the staff. That's just the staff. And then you look at the patients. So patients are emissiated.

So they have complex wounds. Their wounds are not healing, and they're getting complications due to that, malnourished. Everyone is malnourished. And children you see kind of, you know, they are not growing and like literally like children are the worst at the head. You can see them and you can see the hunger, you can in their eyes, kind of, you know. And when they see something kind of, you know, you can tell from someone that how many days this child has been hungry.

Did you get many babies being brought in? Yes. And one of the other problem is that the hospital's out is set up is very complex now. For example, the newborns, the Ameri Hospital is a separate hospital which is a very small hospital, but they have made it as a purely woman hospital. So the deliveries are being done there. And a lot of the like, even the preterms which they bond there, because there is no facility in there for a pediatric ICU. So they are brought to the European Hospital as well. So to captain the preterm

incubators and things like that. So there is, the volume of the pediatric workload on this hospital is huge and they do not have enough facilities to cope with this. And our baby is dying as a consequence? Yes, absolutely. As a significant number. Yes. So we had a pediatric surgeon and who was doing so many operations on every day.

And the pediatric is the worst kind of, you know, affected group in this whole scenario. It's heartbreaking. It's heartbreaking. Devastrating. That's the first thing you'd like is the humanitarian corridor to be massively ramped up. What else would you like to see?

I would like people to look at it from the human beings. commentarian aspect. And I want them to give them a message and make them feel like that people think about them and them make them not feel like that they have been left out and people care about them and people think about them. And in that context, I would particularly like to highlight two particularly groups. Like the one I mentioned to you before was the medical students and the junior doctors. Because their universities and their institutes have been completely destroyed. And they are like, a lost tribe right now and they don't know where to go and what to do their previous all the education years have been completely wasted and they are the future of the healthcare so they need help and support so if we can basically help them and support them and we can educate them we can bring them and

let them study in the universities and send them back and they can continue the health care of the hussar so that is my second request and my third request is definitely immediate and permanent ceasefire because this is something and on a human level as a humanitarian are really pleased to all the world leaders, to please just sit on the table, start communication, peace and dialogue is the only way forward. Is that your message for Prime Minister Sunak and President Biden? Absolutely. I request both of them and all the other Western Arab and all the other leaders. Please, just peace and communication is the only way for you.

Do you think if any of them were able to go to where you went to, they would get it? I invite them to come with me. I literally invite all of them. I even invite you today, peers, come with me and we let's go together and we just look at what are the ground facts and we see them together. You know, I don't think I have your courage, honestly. I think what you've done is an incredibly courageous thing. I think to go to the heart of Gaza right now, particularly with Israel now threatening to attack Rafa. Yeah. It's hard to imagine a more dangerous place than earth. Over 100 journalists, I think have been killed. I don't think I have that in me to do what you've just done. Honestly, I hope they're watching these world is.

and I hope they're listening, but I'm not sure I would want world leaders there because it's too dangerous. One thing which I really, really want to highlight is that this European hospital is the last remaining functional hospital in Gaza. And the situation I've explained to you, it's devastating. If anything happens to this hospital, that will be, I cannot even explain in worlds what will happen to the local civilian population there.

So I want the world to basically all the people to grasp this situation unless, you know, if for a population of nearly kind of, you know, two million, like if there is no single working hospital there and people are dying with all different sort of warfare or non-warfare injuries, what will happen, where will they go? So just put yourself in that situation and have a thing. If your family is there, if your loved one is there, what will you do?

So I want you to do that, basically. Are you going to go back? I definitely will go back. Really? Yes. I have to be the continue to be the ambassador of humanity. And I have to go and keep helping those people. That's a remarkable thing. What do your family think of this? My family are, of course, like any family member, they are worried, they're concerned,

but I really, I share openly with them. And I need their blessings to allow me to go. And they will support me. Dr. Gunae, Sulton, you're an extraordinary man. I think anyone that goes willingly into that hell zone, which is what it is. to try and make a difference is extraordinary. And I really admire your courage and your resolve to do this. And I wish you all the very best.

Thank you. And I hope that the people get the message from someone who's actually been there, just how bad it is. Because whatever your view of this war, the volume of children, women, who've got nothing to do with this, getting blown to pieces every day and having the idea of a 10-year-old boy, I've got three sons, I have a young daughter, the idea of one of them,

having these kind of injuries and having no anesthetic as they have limbs amputated. It's just beyond comprehension. For any parent watching this, it's beyond your worst nightmare. So thank you for what you've done so far. Thank you for what you probably will do again. And I hope that people listen.

Thank you so much. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you.