Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 9/17/25 Dr. Anas Ahmed on the Horror He Witnessed as a Doctor in Gaza

Episode Date: September 19, 2025

Scott interviews Dr. Anas Ahmed about his experience working in one of the only hospitals left in Gaza.   Discussed on the show: “'I Saw the Bodies of Children': Moral Injury and Mental Strain Breaking IDF Soldiers” (Haaretz) The Hundred Years' War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi Dr. Anas Ahmed is a physician practicing in Ohio. In early 2025, he joined up with the Palestinian American Medical Association and traveled into Gaza to work in a hospital. For more on Scott's work: Check out The Libertarian Institute: https://www.libertarianinstitute.org Check out Scott's other show, Provoked, with Darryl Cooper https://youtube.com/@Provoked_Show Read Scott's books: Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine https://amzn.to/47jMtg7 (The audiobook of Provoked is being published in sections at https://scotthortonshow.com) Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism: https://amzn.to/3tgMCdw Fool's Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan https://amzn.to/3HRufs0 Follow Scott on X @scotthortonshow And check out Scott's full interview archives: https://scotthorton.org/all-interviews This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Incorporated https://rrbi.co Moon Does Artisan Coffee https://scotthorton.org/coffee; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom https://www.libertyclassroom.com/dap/a/?a=1616 and Dissident Media https://dissidentmedia.com You can also support Scott's work by making a one-time or recurring donation at https://scotthorton.org/donate/ https://scotthortonshow.com or https://patreon.com/scotthortonshow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, and author of Provote, how Washington started the new Cold War with Russia and the catastrophe in Ukraine. Sign up for the podcast feed at Scotthorton.org or Scott Horton Show.com. I've got more than 6,000 interviews in the archive. for you there going back to 2003 and follow me on all the video sites and X at Scott Horton show all right show introducing anas Ahmed he is an American doctor who recently spent some time in the Gaza Strip welcome the show how you doing pretty good pretty good thanks for having me

on Scott yeah happy to have you here so first of all tell us where you're from and where you practice medicine and these kinds of things yeah of course so I was born in a Baltimore raised Chicago land area. Actually, where I grew up is called Little Palestine. It's the largest congregation of Palestinians in the U.S., Chicago land, southwest suburbs. Went to medical school. I did my residency in Central Ohio, and that's where I practiced medicine. Okay.

And then you say you were in Gaza in May, correct? Yes, all of May. All right. So I guess wherever you want to start, maybe. How you got involved and then go ahead and hit us with some anecdotes. Yeah, of course, man. So immediately kind of after October 7th and a month after that, just kind of seeing what was happening in Gaza,

I was really inclined to try to do something. Process isn't really that complex. There's a lot of different organizations that do work overseas. Probably the most famous one is Doctors Without Borders that people are familiar with. I ended up signing up with an organization called PAMA, Palestinian American Medical Association. So I tried to get in around January to June 2024,

applied a couple times through them and through MedGlobals and other organization. Didn't hear back a lot of times you, I mean, what they essentially require is your passport, your license. Then they send that through the W&DGlob. WHO is their emergency medical team. They have like a deployment division which coordinates with Israel. The main organization in Israel that looks over all these foreign delegates and healthcare workers that are trying to get in

is a coordination of government activities in the territories, a co-get for short. Eventually I heard back April of 2025 as actually really short notice. A lot of times, they won't give these organizations much time. And all the communication is through the WHO and the UN. So I had about two weeks to kind of decide what to do if I wanted to go, talk to my family, make arrangements with work. You know, as a physician in a hospital, usually, especially if you work in a hospital, not just in an outpatient setting.

You know, someone's in-house 24-7. So just trying to find arrangements. Thankfully, my coworkers were pretty awesome and covered a lot of my shifts. So I got the green light, told them that I'm good to go, flew out from, I drove to Chicago, flew out from Chicago to Jordan, Amman. At the time, this was, so this was in May of, or late April 2025. So everyone entering Gaza had to enter through Jordan. Prior to that, it was through the Raffa crossing. So you would fly into Egypt and go there.

But when Israel took over the Rafa border crossing, all the entry was pushed over to Jordan. And that was actually kind of an issue. Like some of my friends that went to Gaza in like 2024, they entered through Egypt. And I mean, they were able to bring in 10, 11, 12 suitcases, big luggage. of medical supplies, food, there was minimal restriction on cash, which in times of war, cash is kind of the mainstay of currency.

But they became a lot more restrictive in terms of what you can bring in. Like we were allowed two suitcases and a personal, and I believe $1,000 was the utmost amount of money you can bring in. So I landed in Jordan, and when you land, some people got there a couple days before. I landed around 8 p.m. and we were due to get on a bus to Gaza at 5 in the morning. And everyone who comes to Jordan awaiting entry into Gaza, they find out if they got the final green light to go in at midnight.

So around midnight, you get an email from Kogat with, has a list of all the people's names. Like, I was here, I was there, obviously from America. There's a doctor from the UK, a doctor from Australia, another guy from the UK, just people from all over the world, a couple guys from Ireland. And everyone just kind of waiting in the hotel of the lobby, just kind of, we get to introduce each other, get to know one another. And you get the email and, you know, some of these guys, their name was in green. So you're good to go.

You can enter. If your name is in red, you can't enter. And if your name is in white, then you have to wait a couple days until they send out a new list to see if you can enter. Which is really kind of, I personally think it's somewhat of a deterrent. Because you make all these arrangements, you fly halfway across the world, and you only find out if you're allowed to enter five, six hours before. So thankfully about, you know, 40% of us, our names were in green. I think the average right now is about 75% rejection rate.

So we go to our rooms, didn't really sleep that night, got up, went to the bus. I was a couple blocks away from the hotel. We got on the bus. We met some other medical. workers from different organizations, everyone gets on the bus, and then we travel towards something called the King Hussein Bridge. That's kind of the main crossing point from Jordan into Israel. And the terminal, the crossing border terminal on the Israeli side is called Allen B. That's when they kind of go over a lot of the security stuff again. They look at your

passport. They ask you some general questions. And we had to wait on both sides of the border. So this happened on a Jordanian side. They take all your luggage, look through it, make sure everything is allowed entrance. Took about three, four hours on a Jordanian side, crossover. Same thing on the Israeli side. Took a couple hours. And this is really where they take, on Israeli side, take some stuff from you. So for instance, a lot of people have been hearing that they don't allow baby formula in. So that crossing is where they would take some of that stuff. Or if there's certain medical equipment, they didn't want you to take into Gaza. They would take it there.

And they wouldn't even tell you that they took it. They'll go through the bags and they'll give them back to you. So some of the docs that we were with didn't realize that they were missing things from their bags until we got into Gaza. I guess they didn't think to look through it. So after Wayne, we get the clearance, hop back onto a bus that took us through the West Bank all the way down to something called the Kisafim border crossing.

The Kisafim is kind of near central Gaza. Just to kind of give, if you listen, there's a breakdown, Gaza is really kind of broken down into four components. There's North Gaza. Then there's central Gaza. That's where Gaza City is. And a little bit below that is an area called Derr-Belah.

That's also in the central region. Then down south is Kahn Yunis. and then below that is Rafah and Rafah shares a border with Egypt so we get down to the Kisafim border which separates Israel and Gaza and the Kisafin border

was just it just looked like a military zone you know it wasn't like the LNB crossing near Jordan whereas this terminal almost looked like a little train station this was essentially just kind of barren land. You see military vehicles, IDF troops. They got on the bus, took everyone's passport, looked through it again. And we had to wait on the bus until the UN, a couple of UN vehicles came, about seven or eight of them, clearly marked UN white Toyota land cruisers. I mean,

these things were really heavy, armor-plated, opening the door, the door probably weighed 70, 80 pounds. In the UN, these workers who are part of this UN convoy, all their communication is through the IDF. I mean, they don't move an inch without coordinating with IDF. That way, they know their movements. They know what path they're taking. They know what roads are taking.

They know what time they're leaving. A lot of times they were telling us, like sometimes they'd have to wait in their car, six, seven, eight hours, 12 hours until they get the green light to move. There's really no reason. You know, they get responded to as these are operational reasons. So we get in these, get in the UN convoy, and they kind of debrief you, like, hey, you know, don't open the windows, don't take photos, don't take videos. If we tell you to do this, do this. If we tell you to get down, get down.

If we tell you to exit the vehicle, exit the vehicle. It's kind of some basic debriefing. Gave us some vests to put on helmets. Then we got into convoys and started heading towards the UN safe house. And then, which was about 20, 30 minutes in the vehicle. I mean, Gaza really is not that big, man. It's about five miles wide, five to six miles wide and 25 miles long. So we reached the UN safe house around 8, 9 p.m.

And that's when we meet some of our delegation. So every organization that you go with has a couple of Gazans, Palestinians in Gaza, on the ground there that they coordinate with. Like our delegation was composed of a young physician, an older doc, and then like a medical student. And they're the ones who kind of take you around the hospital. So we got to meet them at the U.S. Safehouse. They had their own vehicle, clearly demarcated Pamma on the top. of the roof on the sign and one thing that I noticed that a lot of the vehicles had on there

would be like a pretty big sticker on the windshield and in the back window of like an assault rifle with a circle and an X through it kind of to to let them know that you know there's no weapons here that this is a medical vehicle so we got into the car and we made our way to the hospital so the hospital that I worked at spent the majority of my time and it was called Al-Aksa Hospital, and it's in the middle of a Derr-D-Berah region. And a lot of the entry and exit into Gaza is on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

So when people are coming in, Tuesdays and Thursdays and when they're evacuating or leaving, Tuesdays and Thursdays. So, you know, we arrived to the hospital. They kind of gave us a tour of the different units, the different floors, how they're doing in terms of medical equipment, medication, let us know what their protocol is and then they took us to where we were going to be sleeping.

We essentially slept in the hospital. That's where we spent our time in a section that was likely used for medical student lectures, which is kind of a big room, empty, a couple, you know, like twin-sized small mattresses on the floor. It was about seven or eight of a lot. us health care workers that slept in that room, kept our luggage in that room. There was about three or four keys that we kind of all rotated around depending on our shifts.

And almost immediately, man, while we were unpacking, putting our stuff here, like we felt the first bomb go off and it just shook the hospital. And immediately we just looked at each other and we're like, oh man, like, you know, this is it. We're here. That was kind of the first wake-up call, minus everything, to get in and all the logistics and all that. That's kind of when reality set in. Not too long after that, we felt another pretty large explosion close to the hospital. And within five, ten minutes, we began to hear the ambulances.

Sirens going off. So we made our way down to the emergency department. And that was really my first exposure to a mass casualty incident, MCI. And you're seeing these ambulances come in, these paramedics taking people out, civilians coming in on donkey and carriage, families carrying people in because they don't have any other source of transportation. And it was just, it was such a surreal experience. You have, and it goes from a relatively busy emergency department at baseline to just pure chaos.

You have dozens and dozens of people coming in at times almost 150 people in the emergency department. From patients that are bloodied and broken and burned on the floor, families, you know, screaming, trying to figure out what happened to their family member, health care staff, running around. So it was complete chaos. I remember seeing that and it just kind of felt like a deer in headlights at first. And then just you got to switch goes off and you just get to work. And a lot of it was just looking at these healthcare workers in Gaza, these emergency medicine docs,

these residents who are operating at the level of a physician and medical students who are operating who are operating at levels of residents and physicians as well. That first mass casualty incident, we were kind of under their wing. They were showing us what they usually do, obviously due to a lack of equipment, a lack of medications. A lot of our training doesn't translate completely to protocols that we would operate here in the States. So immediately, as people are coming into paramedics,

do a lot of the triaging based on the severity of the injury that they see. An emergency department is broken into really three zones. Red is the main trauma bay where the worst and most severe injuries go to. Yellow is intermediate injuries and green is injuries that can be addressed later on. Any patients that arrive, DOA or dead on arrival are taken to a back room or taken to the morgue where family or friends can go and try to identify family members. And the types of injuries you see are, I mean, everything you can think of, penetrating runes from gunshot wounds,

GSWs, you know, you're talking small caliber, pistol to assault rifle rounds, quadcopter, which are these drones with guns attached to them, these large caliber sniper bullet wounds all the way down to, her up to like Apache helicopter bullets. You see blast injuries, limbs blown off, parts of people's, you know, bodies, just chunks missing from human beings. One of the most common things we saw were severe head injuries, traumatic brain injuries, where people would come in most of the time unconscious, you know, a phrase that was common in a trauma base. was brain out or brain matter out, which kind of signified the severity of that wound.

So anytime we heard that, a lot of our attention would shift to that patient because they were the most critical at the time. And the burns, the burns were very, very severe. We're talking about burn victims are some of the most complex and difficult patients to treat. I mean, a lot of major trauma centers here in the States hospitals have entire burn units and physicians who are burned specialists that train just to deal with these types of injuries.

Because when you're talking about the skin, it's basically a barrier, an armor for all infection and other things that prevent it from making contact with your body. And then the shrapnel injuries were horrific. I mean, people coming in with just pieces of metal embedded in them. If it's not embedded, it likely ripped through them.

so you're seeing people coming in with their stomach ripped open intestines coming out people coming in with parts so you can see parts of the ribs you can see amputations large lacerations big wounds across their face

across their back these types of injuries occur on the entire body surface area and the people that were coming in were from from blittal fetuses because the injuries hurt the mother and at times the laceration would open the mother's womb to infants to children all the way up to the elderly.

I mean, no one was spared. And in terms of a lot of these injuries, man, usually in the states in the trauma bay, one of the first things you do is obviously stabilize a patient. we have something called the ABC's you know A stands for airway you look at the nose and mouth you make sure there's a passage all the way down to the lungs that's clear

B is for breathing once you clear that passage of airway you want to make sure that the patient is actively breathing and then C is for circulation which involves kind of like blood loss how much blood have they lost so they need immediate transfusion so everyone that comes in And the first thing that you do is try to get some access, whether it's like a peripheral IV.

If there was a lot of blood loss, you know, the IV's in the arms, it's really hard to access. Usually in the States, we'd have something called I.O. Intraosius access, which is essentially it's like a little medical drill, which you would use to drill in some of the long bones. That way you can start infusing blood and fluid into the bone marrow. they didn't have anything like that. So if the nurses couldn't get a peripheral IV, then they would require something called central axis, where you would get a larger bore IV and you would try to get it into one of the bigger blood vessels in the body,

like the internal jugular and the neck or the femoral vein on the inside of the thigh. And usually you would have scanning abilities with a CT scan or MRI or ultrasound. obviously that was very, very limited. There was only one CT scan for all of Central Gaza. You're talking about one CT scan for our population around 3 to 400,000. And it was quite a distance away from the hospital.

So we had to determine, like, one, if we sent this patient to the CT scan, would they even be able to survive that journey? and two, you know, which patient is, are we able to intervene on and save? So it was really a judgment call on who got to be sent out to the CT scan in order to better diagnose and trace where their injuries were. Ultrasounds were super useful. I mean, thankfully, we were able to bring in some portable ultrasounds. When someone's in a trauma bay, you can get a lot of information very quickly.

you kind of ultrasound their stomach to look for internal bleeding, ultrasound their lungs. A common thing that happened to was something called a hemothorax or a pneumothorax. Essentially with these blast injuries, with this shrapnel going everywhere, a lot of times it damages the lungs and then a patient starts to bleed into their lungs, which hinders their breathing capacity. So almost every patient that was coming in would require a chest tube. where you essentially make an incision on the side

and you put a tube in between the ribs to start draining out blood. One thing that was common in the children was that's a hemothorax, something called the pneumothorax. Just because of the power of these bombs and the energy from the wave blasts and just the fragile body of children, that waveplast would essentially collapse the lung. So there wouldn't be any fluid in there, because the lungs are kind of like a negative pressure vacuum.

So it collapsed along, we do the same thing, put that tube in between the ribs, and then you just hear kind of a whoosh of air coming out. And the lung would be able to expand after that. In terms of blood products, those were limited. So we had to pick and choose who we thought would be able to survive and kind of prioritize them in terms of blood transferects. And just everything else. Like all these procedures that I'm talking about are usually done in sterile conditions.

Like here in the States, if I'm going to put in a central line or put in a chest tube or do any IV access, I'd put on sterile gloves, which are these gloves that are in sterile packing. I would have something like rubbing alcohol or beta dine that I can clear the area on the skin where I'm about to do an incision. I mean, that was not existent. Very, very limited sterile products like rubbing alcohol or beta dine. Whatever they did have, they would prioritize it for the operating room, the OR. And we just kind of have to be left to our devices in the trauma bay. So yeah, man, that first MCI was a pretty bad one.

And it was quite a shocker, man. I remember that. Patients kept coming in for about two, three hours. And we were working nonstop. And when things finally calmed down, you just see a lot of the workers that have been doing this for the past two years, just begin to kind of joke around with each other, try to break the tension in the room.

Well, yeah, it was a pretty surreal experience. Okay, well, and just to clarify NCI. It's multiple casualty incident, right? Yeah, so it's a mass casualty incident, correct? Oh, man, all right, well, what an introduction to our discussion here. I want to point out this article that's running in Horowitz today, I guess it came out yesterday. It's called I Saw the Bodies of Children, Moral Injury and Mental Strain, Breaking IDF Soldiers. And there's a write-up of it at anti-war.com, and this goes to the previous stories about the

essentially ambushing the people at the aid sites, as told by Anthony Aguilar and others, including other IDF soldiers and officers to Haaretz previously. But this is a sniper that talked to Harretz, and he's essentially telling the same story. There's an imaginary line. And instead of just putting up like metal barricades or even, you know, yellow caution takes,

tape or something, they enforce the line that the people are supposed to follow by shooting at them. And this guy, his name is Benny, he says, there's a line that if they cross it, I can shoot them. It's like a game of cat and mouse. They try to come from a different direction every time, and I'm there with the sniper rifle. And the officers are yelling at me, take him down, take him down. I fire 50 to 60 bullets every day. I've stopped counting kills. I have no idea how many I've killed. A lot. Children. End quote. And then he says, the battalion commander would yell over the radio. Why aren't you taking them down? They're heading our way. This is dangerous. He says, the sense is that we are being positioned in an impossible situation, and no one has prepared

us for this. The officers do not care if children die. They also do not care what it does to my soul. to them, I am just another tool, which, you know, smallest violin for him, but still, like, he does have a point there that that's the situation that the United States, as well as the government of Israel, especially, of course, the government of Israel are putting him in there. Of course, he could just shoot his officer and set himself free, but instead he goes on killing kids. But at least, you know, they're telling the story, the IDF soldiers are telling the stories to the press there about the atrocities that they're committing. So I add that just, essentially as a set up for the next question, which is your impression about how the war is

being carried out there. You know, we're told on one hand that the enemy is Amalek and they must all be annihilated, the men, the women, the children, and the babies too. And then, what do you know? They sure do kill a lot of innocent civilians. Then on the other hand, we're told, no, they're just hunting Hamas. And if these other people get in the way, well, they're just human shields and those are the breaks. And so I wonder, you know, what you can tell from inside the emergency room about how

the war is being conducted outside of it. Yeah, yeah, of course. I mean, honestly, anyone who knows the history of Israel and Palestine and the multiple previous operations that Israel has conducted is not surprised at the way they're conducting this war. There's so much objective evidence and facts detailing how little precautions Israel takes in any of these operations. I mean, they simply do not see the Palestinians as human beings. They really don't. They dehumanize them to the point where they're just, I mean, even worse than animals. They're just these creatures that they need to get rid of.

In terms of patients coming into the emergency department, like I was saying, I mean, we saw fetuses ripped out of their mothers. We saw babies that weren't even three, four days old. Wait, let me stop you there on the previous point there. The way you said before it seemed to be you were saying

from injury from the bomb damage, like the women are torn up so badly that, you know, that on the other hand, the way you said it there sounded more like Sabra and Shatilla, where a soldier actually did it by hand or something. So I just want to make sure you can be specific about what you mean by that. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

I mean, I don't know most of them, I assume, were shrapnel injuries because of the area we were located. During my entire time in Gaza, I didn't see an IDF soldier other than entering and exiting. The area we were in was mainly, I mean, aerial airstrikes bombing campaigns. I'm glad we got to be from Shrep. It's important to have that clarification because that did happen at Sabra and Shatilla. I forgot which refugee camp it was where one of the militias under the control of Ariel Sharon at the time actually did that to a Palestinian woman, you know, with a knife in his own hands. And then that was also one of the fake accusations from October the 7th as well.

So if you're saying something along those lines, I want to make sure that we get real clarity and facts and not anything that sounds embellished or is embellished. Absolutely. But yeah, the patients that would come in were of all ages. Like, there was never a day or never a mass casualty incident where it was only military aged men, for instance. Like any time patients were streaming into the emergency department, there was always like families. You know, you would see children, you would see infants, you would see the elderly, middle-aged, like what a typical family would be. Because a lot of people in Gaza, they live in family units. You know, you'd have your immediate family, your wife, your kids, and then living with you in the same apartment or floor above you would be your cousins,

your brother and all of his siblings, your parents. But never in the entire month that I was there that I see, you know, like a dozen injuries come in of all military Asian men or anything of that sort. So that kind of gives an impression. that a lot of this bombing is very indiscriminate in nature. And I just want to kind of give the listeners an idea of a comparison of the mass casualty events in Gaza compared to what we'd see here in the States. The largest mass shooting in American history was in Las Vegas in 2017,

where you had a single shooter elevated position, 61 people who died, 413 that were wounded between the ages of 20 to 16. A hundred percent of those injuries were penetrating traumas from GSW's gunshot wounds. All those injuries were sent to about five, yeah, sent to five hospitals within Las Vegas area that had a capacity of 2,075 beds. They had 67 operating rooms. I couldn't find data on two of the hospitals. And they had 236 emergency department beds.

I couldn't find how many emergency department beds in one hospital. And you're talking about these hospitals with the highest, most modern technology, fully stocked in terms of surgical equipment, fully staffed, all the medications that you need. They were able to call in emergency extra medical staff to come assist during this crisis. Now, compare this to one of the deadliest days in Gaza, which really highlights the indiscriminate nature of Israel's campaign that we're talking about was the hostage massacre at the New Saitat refugee camp.

This happened in June 24. Israel, the IDF disguised themselves as humanitarian workers and like displaced persons. They conducted a daytime rate to free four of their hostages. According to the IDF, firefight broke out. So they called in ground in a air strikes. This was in a densely populated residential area. and a market area very close by. 274 dead, 700 wounded, ages from infants to the elderly,

and all those were distributed to one major hospital, Oaksa, the one I was working at. It had 150 beds, compared that to 2,000. Had five OARs compared to 67. And I had 19 emergency department beds at the time. 17 of which were already occupied with people just on a regular day coming into the emergency department for help. And in terms of the injuries, you know, in Vegas, you had 100% penetrating traumas and they were all adults, which really makes a difference because when you're treating an infant or a child, you know, they're not just little adults or physiology is different. So a lot of the things you do and you need different types of specialists to treat them.

And this is in a small hospital in Gaza with old archaic technology, a hospital already operating at a crisis level of staff, minimal supplies, no CT scanner, minimal ultrasounds, minimal pain medications. So just to kind of draw a picture of the type of environment these healthcare workers are operating in in a type of environment that these civilians seek medical treatment in. And by the way, the U.S. and Israeli media hailed this massacre as a successful, you know,

hostage rescue mission. Can you imagine something like that happening anywhere else in the world where, yes, you rescued four of your hostages, but at what cost, 200 dead civilians, 700 wounded It's It's very grim man

It's very grim Yeah I mean I had to quit X because I can only abuse it Not use it So I have these other projects I just have to get done So I've been staying away I couldn't help but get on there

For a minute to check some things In current events And maybe post an angry meme And then But I couldn't I'm not on there for things 30 seconds before I see a giant massacre and, I don't know, six or eight dead Palestinian civilians on the ground there and total chaos around.

Yeah, I mean, it's the same thing on Instagram too. I mean, despite all these social media platforms trying to limit the flow of information out of Gaza, there's just so much of it that is just overwhelming. And then, you know, I look at antirewar.com every morning and I don't have the stomach to do as much reading as I should anymore. Plus, I got excuses, so I'm busy, but every day it's at least a Waco massacre. You know, Waco was, some say 76, some say 86. I forget. I'd have to go ask David Tippettow or something, but, you know, whatever.

Somewhere around there, massacred by the FBI and the Army Delta Force there in 93, they called it as suicide, but it wasn't. and but the thing is so that's essentially the violence inflicted on the Palestinians and I'm rounding down I think it's usually more like a hundred every day but then sometimes it's only like 50 so I don't want to exaggerate so let's just call it approximately a Waco massacre worth of violence perpetrators people every single day for two years now yeah there's an Israeli minister who said and I'm not quoting him I don't remember his exact words but something along the lines of, we can get away with killing 100 Palestinians and the world won't notice or the media won't really care a day. And it really is that much, man, because

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It reminds me of what the Clinton people told. the Bosnian Muslims, you need at least 5,000 dead, and then we can come. But you've got to get the number up to five, okay? And then here we are. We're like 100,000 innocent civilians killed minimum. And they can just do Srebrenica every day

and the U.S. regime wouldn't care if it was that much, I guess. Yeah. And in terms of the breakdown, too, I mean, a majority of Gaza, I believe 47% of the population is under the age of 18. So they're considered children. And 40% of that 47% are under 15 years old. So it's a very, very young population.

And it translated to what we saw in an emergency department. And I knew that coming in. Like I had to review because I'm a physician for adults, internal medicine, some critical care experience. So 100% of the patients I see when I'm working here back at home are adults. So I had to do a lot of reading and studying, like, pediatric. Well, they must make you do your time in the emergency room here, right, where you see car accidents and stuff like that, gunshot wounds.

It depends on where you work. I work in rural Ohio, so I don't see, compared to, for instance, if I worked in one of the major metropolitan cities where they would see a lot of gunshot wounds, stabbings, things of that sort, those are the vast majority. of traumas that we see in the States. Yeah. You know, you very rarely do you see, you know, explosive injuries or shrapnel injuries.

And then, but you personally, you barely even see those usually. And now here you're looking directly at war casualties and people maimed beyond any belief. I mean, how do you deal with that? Are you okay? Yeah, man, no, I'm fine. I mean, thankfully, you kneel on faith

and just just thinking about what these, People are enduring what these Palestinians in Gaza are enduring. You know, I got a taste of that for a month. They've just been dealing with this for two years. And it's crazy, man. But yeah, to answer your initial question, yeah, I mean, by seeing the types of patients that come in, majority kids, majority women, blast injuries,

and it's not like Israel doesn't have, the capacity for targeted strikes. I mean, we saw that in Iran, we saw that in Syria, we saw that all over the world where they would laser in on, you know, one room in a certain apartment complex and take, you know, take whoever their target. Including in this war, right, flying a drone in the window and getting, oh, what's this name, the head of the Al-Cossom brigades, right? Yeah, yeah.

I mean, so they have the capacity to be accurate. I mean, you're talking about one of the most advanced, militaries on the planet, you know, they're very sophisticated. The type of technology they have is very, very sophisticated. Now, is it true that you guys have just no anesthesia? So you're just sitting there saw on people's legs off with a hacksaw and they're screaming in like the worst kind of horror movie situation beyond belief kind of deal? Because I've read that a few times, but I don't really know. Yeah, no, it definitely does happen. We saw that for, for a couple days. Because, I mean, when I was there in May, that was what? So the complete blockade happened

early March. So you're talking about a couple months after that in May, and they were already very, very short. So anesthetics, they really... Oh, yeah, I meant to ask that. I meant to, yes, to remind everyone. So you got there right as they were lifting the siege to some degree anyway. So you got to see sort of the results of the two months of total deprivation there.

Yeah. So when I left the end of May is when the GHF kind of started rolling out. But while we were there, I mean, people were desperate, man. We were running low on almost everything. So usually when you take someone down to the operating room, anesthesia is really composed of a medication that makes you unconscious, a medication that, and a medication that like paralyzes the body, paralytic and then like an induction agent. what they had and what they used like in emergency department we would use ketamine a lot because ketamine can do both it can make you unconscious similar to like propofal and it also reduces pain even that in the emergency department we like when a mass casualty instead would come in we'd have some already pre-drawn up and we would limit that amount that we had so every provider had maybe one or two doses of ketamine. So you would have to choose. I mean, even patients that we knew were going to

die, it would have been great if we had enough ketamine to at least, you know, ease their suffering as they were dying. But we had to save that medication for other patients that needed procedures. But yeah, and so any time a mass casualty incident was done, I would go down to the operating room to check on some of the patients that we stabilize. And in some of the operating rooms, if they were low on medications, they would essentially just keep using a ketamine instead of an anesthetic. But yeah, in terms of, and it also depends on the hospital too. Like up north and north of Gaza, Shiffa Hospital, their supply was almost non-existent.

Because at that time, the north was, there was a blockade, the north was essentially shut off. So a lot of those stories that you hear are definitely real. And I've had, you know, health care workers that I've talked to that were personally in, in rooms where things like that had to happen. So I don't understand though, like maybe because I just don't like imagining it very well. Like, so if you have a five-year-old and you got to cut his leg off and you have no anesthesia, you just punch him, knock him out somehow, or not? He just sits there and deals with it.

it yeah so honestly a lot of times uh one of the most important things like those whole civil war movies man you would give uh the adult or the child like something to bite on or give them like the sleeper hold right not where you choke their air exactly family would be would be holding them down um sometimes they'd be conscious throughout the whole thing sometimes like their sympathetic system would go into such overdrive from the immense pain that they would faint that they would go unconscious from the amount of pain that they're in. But even outside of that, and all these patients that we would see, you know, whether we stabilize them, whether we had to amputate an arm or a leg or whatever, even outside of that

initial encounter, there was very limited pain medication to give them, for instance, for dressing changes or for cleaning their wounds. And infection rates were sky high due to the lack of sterile products, sterile gloom. loves, lack of alcohol and betadine. Like here in the States, when you're using, you know, scapple or surgical kits, a lot of them are sterilized in these huge industrial size machines that heat it up to like 280 degrees. If there's certain instruments that can't withstand that heat,

they'll chemically sterilize them or use pressure machines. So it's a pretty sophisticated process. while here they'll use like rubbing alcohol that you grab from your local store here and try the best that they can to clean these instruments so the infection rates were through the roof so even if these patients survived the initial trauma making it to the ED they survive the initial procedures and surgical procedures we do on them there's no guarantee that they're going to survive the next couple days or weeks what do you do for clean water? and all this.

How are you able to even wash your hands and that kind of... Yeah. So before October 7th, they had some desalination plants. They said they had some water plants. Obviously, Israel, not only targeting people, but they're targeting kind of the civil infrastructure

of Gaza as well. They were bombing sewage plants, water plants, agricultural plants. So in terms of water, in the hospital, there would be, you know, at times two, three days, where we'd go without water. They had a, in the hospital itself, they had a central water cleaning machine where,

I mean, and it was clean for the local population. And when I say clean, you know, you can put quotation marks on that because I don't, you know, I didn't run any labs on it. But I know, like Oxfam ran some research on it. And at the time they were saying that around 70% of the water, wouldn't be deemed drinkable and developed countries. And I felt that, man. Even with my little water bottle with a filtration straw in it that I had that I would

use to filter out the water, I still got, you know, gastroenteritis, you know, stomach viruses and diarrhea and vomiting. The locals, their immune system is a bit heftier, so they're used to it. But even they would get sick from the water. at times they would target these plants destroy them some of the civil defense civil infrastructure workers there would try to get it back up and running and the same thing with electricity

the hospital had backup generators but obviously those are run by fuel and fuel was short so at times there would be hours long stretches of time where they would run out of electricity and in the hospital setting that's catastrophic I mean, if you don't have water, you can't really run dialysis machines. Obviously, you can't provide drinking water to patients.

Electricity, as long as there's a backup generator, a lot of these people who are in the ICU, intensive care unit, they're on mechanical ventilators. Obviously, need electricity in order to breathe for the patient. They're on these machines that infuse these medications that are keeping these patients alive. So there's no doubt that people have lost their lives due to a lack of basic amenities like water, food, and electricity. Yeah. You know, our great news editor at the Institute, Kyle Anzalone, Libertarian Institute.

com, he was documenting in detail about their excuse for withholding, you know, bandages and antiseptic and anesthesia, scissors and any kind of thing, was they would call them dual-use items, which just like they do with human shields, they take a term that already means something and then they just misapply it. So dual use always meant like a magnet that could be used for all kinds of scientific experiments, but also it could be used to help spin uranium centrifuge or whatever part of that process, right? So it's dual use means this thing could be used. Oh, another example. This is what they did to Iraq under Saddam Hussein after Iraq War I. They said, no, you can't have chlorine for your drinking water because chlorine

can be used as a chemical weapon. That's a dual use item, so no chlorine for you. And of course, then people all died of dysentery and cholera and the rest because of that. Yeah. But so it was a cheap excuse then, but at least the term meant something. Here, dual use now means someone else could use it. So if you send in anesthesia, well, Hamas could benefit from anesthesia. So that makes it a dual use. I know. And I'd love to ask them, you know, what's the dual use for baby formula? You know, these people are starving mothers who gave birth are unable to feed their newborns because they themselves don't have nutrition enough calories to produce breast milk. So what's the dual use of baby formula besides, you know, to me, they see it just as a quick

and easy way to kill off new Palestinians. Obviously. That's exactly what it is. Palestinian babies grow up to be Palestinians. Exactly. And they've said that. and sometimes outright and sometimes encoded language. I mean, it's truly devastating, man.

The biggest thing that impacted me there was honestly the children. I mean, there's a new medical term that was really formulated by healthcare workers and humanitarian workers in Gaza, WCNSF, short for wounded child, no surviving family. I can think off the top of my head, I can see their faces, at least a dozen kids that we worked on in the emergency department, that we tried to stabilize, some of them survived, some of them died, and not a single family member came in to check on them.

Even when I'd go up to their rooms, you know, the next day, two, three, four days from now, there would be maybe a distant cousin or a neighbor that would come check on them because their entire family was wiped out. I mean, the amount of children that we saw was just simply unbelievable. And, you know, children are the most innocent thing in life. You know, their curiosity, their love of life is so pure and innocent. You know, everything to them is a new experience, something to learn. And when you see being like that, that's experiencing such unbelievable amount of pain and fear,

and they're unable to rationalize it, they're unable to make sense of it, it's something That's truly heartbreaking. And at the same time, like I remember this child, maybe seven or eight years old. It's honestly difficult to assess their age because they're also malnourished. And a lot of them are older than what they look like because they're not growing properly. But this kid who lost both of his arms and he was just always smiling. He was always happy. One of the things that I filled my bags with was just a bunch of candy, you know, chocolate.

and different types of candies. And me and some of my other colleagues, we'd go up to the pediatric ward and we'd always pass out candies. And these children would light up, like something so simple would bring them so much joy because of the misery that they're in. I mean, even the mothers, man,

like the mothers would joke around. They'd be like, oh, you know, the kids are getting candy, why can't we have some candy? And we tell them we're like, let us make our rounds, give all the kids some, and we'll come back and give you guys some too.

I mean, even like now multiple UN and humanitarian organizations have cited that Gaza has the highest number of child amputees per capita, not just in the world, but in modern history. And what's devastating is these injuries are so complex because children's bodies are programmed to grow. So if you had a child with these types of injuries, like here in the States or in Europe, they would require, you know, several sources. surgeries throughout childhood as they grew up in order to kind of transition things and they would need prosthetic adjustment every six months or every four months. I mean, it's a very, very complex process, even in, you know, in the developed world. But you see these kids who are just wounded and scarred and it's something that's going to devastate them for the rest of their lives.

All right, listen, I'm sorry, man. I better let you go, but just one last question is, how many hospitals are even left in the Gaza Strip at this point? Yeah, yeah, no, of course. Remember that argument? It's all quaint now about whether. Yeah, I remember that first explosion that happened in the courtyard. Yeah, did they bond that parking lot or not? Yeah.

Yeah. So prior to the war, there was 36 hospitals in Gaza that had about 3,500 beds serving the 2.3 million population in Gaza. Every single hospital has been attacked. Currently, out of the 36 hospitals, the latest information I saw from the UN was about 16 are partially functioning. And the only one that's fully functioning is in the south, which is a Nosser medical complex. That's the only one that you would qualify as somewhat of a fully functioning hospital. In the north, Shifa, which was the largest hospital prior to the war, and that was like kind of their academic institute, like, you know, their John Hopkins or Mayo Clinic. I mean, you can look up the videos or look up the pictures.

They completely bombed it. You know, at the time when massacres were happening up there, they only had two open operating rooms. So in the north, there's no functioning hospital. In central Gaza, there's maybe two or three functioning hospitals. and in the south, Nasser medical complex is considered the only fully functioning hospital in the entire Gaza Strip. God dang. All right.

Do you have places to go back there? Yes. So past couple months, they've been very, very restrictive on allowing physicians in, but I'm definitely going to try to go back. It's hard to, after kind of seeing all these things and kind of being amongst the people and communicating with them and just really living with them for a month. It's hard to not.

I feel like a part of you is still there. So I'm going to try my best to go back. I'm hoping for November, December. And I plan on going back as much as I can until they stop me from going. And hopefully whenever this war ends, I want to go back and try to help rebuild as well. Yeah.

Well, I don't have the courage or the skills for anything like that, but I'll should cheer you on from here and thank you for doing that. I'm very grateful for what you're doing for those poor people. And somebody's got to. I mean, the history of this thing can't be that we were all in on it. Yeah, absolutely. And just one thing I want to mention to people is just, you know,

we hear all these numbers about 100,000, 200,000 possibly dead. I think the number is going to end up being catastrophically high and just try to humanize these people. Like for every number, that's a human being, that's a soul. It's a mother, a father, a child that meant the world to someone else. Before I went, my daughter was about 11 months old when I left to Gaza. And I'm grateful that I had the opportunity to go after she was born because it really changed my perspective on a lot of things.

And it helped me be a lot more empathetic and kind of work through the exhaustion. But yeah, these people are, they're human beings. I mean, everyone has heard the story of Hind, that six-year-old girl, that, you know, had 350 bullets shot into her vehicle and essentially bled out. You know, that's just one story of tens of thousands, of hundreds of thousands. And a lot of this stuff is going to come out whenever this war ends. I mean, there's a reason why they're not letting international journalists into Gaza. You know, there's a reason they're hunting down the Palestinian journalists who are employed by, you know, different media companies out here.

I mean, you're talking about more journalists that have been killed in Gaza than essentially every single major war combined since the U.S. Civil War, from World War I to World War II to Vietnam to GYWA, all of those combined is still less than the amount of journalists that have been killed in Gaza. I mean, that's a simple question alone of, it's like you ask yourself, why won't Israel let international journalists in? I mean, that question alone should really break this narrative that they keep pushing. Well, and as you said, why they killed so many journalists, the Committee to Protect Journalists has been keeping score. And we know, too, like, they'll wait until the reporter leaves the house and then kill his wife and children, you know, bomb his house,

extra punishment, kill him later that night, but let him suffer for 24-hour, you know, 12 hours knowing that they killed his family first. This is just absolutely ruthless what they do. I mean, you see what they're doing in Gaza City now. It's the most densely populated. That was the pictures I was talking about. Yeah, that was the, that was the pictures I saw on Twitter today. And those missiles that are like tons and tons of missiles just bringing down these apartment buildings. And before they started this invasion, they killed the most prominent journalist in northern Gaza, Anisil Sharif, him and his entire crew that worked for Al Jazeera.

You know, it's not a coincidence that they wipe out the most prominent journalist before they start to begin their invasion. Well, you hit on the thing to me that bothers me the most out of all these is the way they bomb all these high rises. They're burying people alive in there. And that's like the scariest thing of all. That was what George W. Bush did, Dabu Zabeta, put him in a coffin with a bunch of cockroaches and whatever other bugs and then buried them alive for a couple of days down there.

One of the civil defense workers I was talking about, you know, these are the guys with the vests that go in with their simple tools, man, like a pickax, sledgehammer, small hammer, a shovel to try to dig people out. Yeah, there's no back, though. There's no, no, no. And they say that, you know, as soon as they're first on scene, they get there, you know, they hear a lot of people under the rubble, people screaming in pain, screaming for help. and as they try to dig him out

and as the hours and hours go by you know the the sounds of people just gets lower and lower and lower until it's just this eerie quiet and it's all these people just suffocating under the rubble yeah or imagine even worse they actually have a little bit of fresh air through a crack somewhere

maybe their leg is pinned or not but they don't have any lethal injuries but they just got to die for five days you know, starving to death in there, dehydrating to death in there. The way you describe it is almost a mercy if they die by midnight compared to what I was thinking, you know? Yeah, no, a lot of them are prolonged, I'm pretty sure. And I think that's where we're missing a lot of these casualties, man. Like the media is always questioning, oh, the Gaza Health Ministry numbers, we can't trust them.

Yeah, no, they're way too low, obviously. Yeah, even from a purely objective fact-based. perspective, when you compare the Gaza Ministry of Health numbers and previous assaults on Gaza, whether it was, you know, 2014 or 2008 or 2021, their numbers have always been so damn close to UN numbers. And if anything, what their numbers are is an underestimation because they go off of people who come into the hospital, people who have official IDs. You know, You think about the tens of thousands of people that are stuck under the rubble. Those aren't incorporated in the estimate of the people who died in Gaza.

Yeah. Well, and then there's just, you know, the excess death rate. You know, in Iraq War II, Iraq body count, they did a good job. Like, it's just what they would do is they would go for every confirmed death from American fire. And so they had, I don't know, 60,000 or whatever it was. I forget the number. But it was like high tens of thousands. But it, and it was like, yeah, I mean, that was low because there were a lot of things that weren't reported that or they were not able to find two definite different Iraqi sources, media sources to cite or whatever it was.

So maybe double that. But that's just the direct casualties from Americans pulling triggers. But we all know that the worst of what happened in Iraq. War II was the civil war between the Shiite and Sunni militias, with the Shiites backed by the U.S. most of the time. And then the overall deprivation of the civil war and the total destruction of the electric grid and the entire destruction of the economy and the distribution of food and medical care to people and checkpoints everywhere. So some old man's having a heart attack. He can't get to the hospital because there's a giant line to get through. And all of those things

led to this excess death rate, as they calculated. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Like, yeah, it was approximately a million people died who wouldn't have died. That didn't mean that a million of them were directly shot to death by a Marine, but it meant that that's how many people died because of the war. And the same kind of thing where you go, you know, it's upwards of 300-something thousand, probably more than that in the Yemen War of 2015 through 21. And so the same thing here is if the health ministry is saying,

Well, we have 60,000 names of dead people who we have their body and we can attach a name to their body, then we know that the number is much higher than that. That's them being as conservative as they possibly can, probably just for their own credibility's sake, because they don't want to be caught claiming one death more than they can absolutely prove, right? Yeah. I mean, conflict research, it's for every one death that's a direct cause of violence. you attribute three more deaths to that from deprivation or starvation or lack of medications. Like when I'd wake up in the morning, I would round on patients on the hospital floor.

And really simple things, man, like asthma or like a typical flu or things like diarrhea or even things like, you know, heart attack, strokes. All these things we did not have the interventional capacity to treat. We did not have the medications to treat. I mean, forget about it. Things like cancer. If someone had cancer prior to this conflict occurring, I mean, those are all deaths that are attributed to the conflict. Yeah, what a horror show.

All right, well, thank you for your service. You're really doing the right thing here, and I really appreciate it, and on behalf of a lot of other people, too. Well, thank you for your time, man. Just one more thing. I encourage people to try to dig a little bit deeper on this conflict. There's a ton of historical books.

I talk about kind of Zionism as a nationalistic ideology. You know, off the top of my head, Rashid Khalidi's book is phenomenal. Dr. Norman Finkelsene is a world's leading scholar on Gaza. Max Blumenthal is a phenomenal journalist that has done documentaries and has plenty of articles on the gray zone. what we can do here as American citizens and just people all over the world we can educate ourselves on the topic

and cut through the propaganda and the media garbage and hopefully hold our politicians and our representatives to account that our taxpayer dollars should be spent and used here on us and even if they're used overseas let it be for a beneficial cause not to sponsor and propagate a genocide in our name.

All right, thank you again. Appreciate it. Thanks, Scott. Have a good one, ma'am. All right, you guys, that is Anas Ahmed, MD. Thanks for listening to Scott Horton Show, which can be heard on APS Radio News at Scott Horton.org,

Scott Horton Show.com, and the Libertarian Institute at libertarian institute.