“Death Is Everywhere”: Doctor Who Volunteered in Gaza and Lebanon Condemns Israeli Attacks on Hospitals

AMY GOODMAN: A team of United Nations experts has accused Israel of committing war crimes and the crime of extermination for its, quote, “relentless and deliberate attacks on medical personnel and facilities,” unquote. This comes as medical authorities in Gaza report Israel has killed at least 63 more Palestinians amidst an intensifying siege on the northern Gaza Strip.

The situation at three hospitals in northern Gaza remains critical as medical workers struggle to respond to forced expulsions ordered by Israel. The director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, filmed this video from inside the intensive care unit on Thursday.

DR. HUSSAM ABU SAFIYA: [translated] We are here under threat, because our hospital will go out of service due to the continuous threats to evacuate the hospital and due to the lack of entry of fuel to the Kamal Adwan Hospital. From here, from the middle of the intensive care unit, I call on all the international organizations and humanitarian organizations and the international community to stop the occupiers from implementing their decision to evacuate the Kamal Adwan Hospital and ceasing its services. Stopping the Kamal Adwan Hospital from providing services means the ending of these children’s lives.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined right now by Dr. Bing Li, an emergency medicine physician based in Arizona who worked at the Indonesian Hospital in the north of Gaza as a volunteer with Rahma Worldwide. Dr. Li is a U.S. Army veteran. She’s joining us now from Beirut, Lebanon, where she’s working to increase healthcare capacities as a volunteer with MedGlobal.

Dr. Bing Li, thank you so much for being with us. If you can start on the situation in Gaza?

DR. BING LI: Thank you, Amy.

So, the situation, especially in north Gaza, has been incredibly heartbreaking for those of us that volunteered and met many of the people that work in north Gaza in these three hospitals, and for me at Indonesian Hospital, where I spent two weeks.

These people that chose to stay in north Gaza — the doctors, the nurses, the administrators, even the janitors — they stayed because they knew that they needed to be there for their patients. They are the most impressive people, the most courageous and the most principled people that I have ever met, and it has been incredibly hard to hear their stories right now. They are people that never complain, that have unlimited patience, that showed us generosity. Usually when I ask them, “How are you doing? Are you OK?” they always say, “Thank God, I am fine.” There’s no complaint. The other day, one of them reached out to me to ask how I was doing because of the hurricanes, and he was concerned that in the U.S. that it wasn’t safe because of these hurricanes that are happening.

And what is happening now, this is the first time that I have heard many of these people be concerned, to show complaints. The medical director at Indonesian Hospital, he says that there are over 40 patients that are trapped inside the hospital, that it is unsafe for them to go anywhere, unsafe for them to step outside to try to evacuate these patients. They are running out of food, running out of water. There already was such a limited amount of medical supplies and medications during the time that we were working there in June, and those are now running out. They’re running out of fuel for electricity, for the ventilators that keep patients breathing on machines.

There are 17 staff that are trapped with them that are just doing daily what they can. They’ve been trapped now for five days, unable to leave the hospital. And the other doctors are unable to come in to relieve them, because, one of them told me, he was trying to travel to the hospital to be there, and in front of him he saw an ambulance get struck by a missile, and so it was unsafe for him to continue passing.

They tell me that it feels like death is everywhere. The smell of death is everywhere. They have nowhere safe to go. One of the medical students, a 20-year-old who has been — that worked every day very hard, always trying to take care of patients, he’s telling me that his family has been displaced now four times in the past three days, that there are bombs going off constantly around them in the homes next door. They’re not sure where they might go next.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me ask you about —

DR. BING LI: There’s been —

AMY GOODMAN: Let me ask you about the group Medical Aid for Palestinians, who says it’s removed newborn babies from Kamal Adwan, but that ambulances are being detained at military checkpoints as they attempt to reach Gaza City. The humanitarian group warned, “The world must act before Gaza is erased entirely.” Now, Dr. Bing Li, you did not work at Kamal Adwan, but it was your referral center for OB-GYN and pediatric cases. Your response to this news of the infants?

DR. BING LI: This is incredibly concerning. We must remember that when we say that a hospital, especially in north Gaza, is being told to evacuate, it’s not the same as you’re going from one hospital that is fully functional to another hospital that is fully functional, because the healthcare system has been devastated to this extent. Both Kamal Adwan Hospital and Indonesian Hospital, they have been forced to close multiple times. Not only have they been directly hit by bombs, but then they are occupied by a ground invasion, and so it becomes unsafe to continue to operate.

And then, what is impressive is that the healthcare administrators, the healthcare leaders come together, and they open up these hospitals in one week, in two weeks’ time. When we arrived at Indonesian Hospital, they were able to open up two floors, the ER and the surgical floor, within two weeks of the occupying force having left.

So, with this piecemeal way that people are coming together and making things work, we rely on these different hospitals to work together. So, Kamal Adwan Hospital was the only hospital that was receiving pediatric patients, that could take very sick patients into their ICU. They have a nutrition center to help the extremely malnourished children that can’t be released, that would die without IV support and die without hospital nutritional support. And they also took in the OB patients, the pregnant women and the neonatal patients.

So, as an ER physician, it’s very concerning to me to hear that there are children that are this young, that are babies, infants, that are being told they need to evacuate to be transported to other facilities, because I think this is impossible. There is nowhere else for them to go. This was the only facility that was in that area. And I know that the U.N. forces and the Palestinian Red Crescent, that has been trying to get up to that area to try to evacuate these patients, they’ve not been allowed through.

Another point that many people do not realize when they hear about north Gaza and south Gaza is that they are completely divided. It is about as hard to get from outside Gaza into south Gaza as it is to get from south Gaza to north Gaza. There is a whole new border, a whole military blockade between the north and the south. And that is why we say that it’s different. Virtually no aid, virtually no help is allowed into north Gaza at this time. And so, these children that are being told to evacuate, these patients, there simply isn’t the infrastructure, there isn’t the equipment present and the safety present for them to go anywhere, for them to be put on an ambulance and safely be transported to another facility, that doesn’t exist. It’s essentially a death sentence for these infants, for these very young children that need a high level of care, that need IC levels of care.

AMY GOODMAN: This is the director of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Ramesh Rajasingham.

RAMESH RAJASINGHAM: Critical items are awaiting approval for entry. Our access is restricted. For example, yesterday, OCHA and the World Health Organization tried to reach northern Gaza to support the Kamal Adwan Hospital after Israeli authorities offered its immediate evacuate. And after receiving a green light from the Israeli authorities for the mission, the team was forced to wait at a holding point for hours, and ultimately the mission had to be aborted. And that’s not an unusual practice. In September, less than 10% of coordinated missions to the north were facilitated by the Israeli authorities.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s the director of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Ramesh Rajasingham. Dr. Bing Li, if you can respond to that and also the U.N. chief António Guterres saying he’s written directly to the Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, warning him against dismantling the U.N. agency tasked with providing food and healthcare and social services to Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank? Two bills under consideration in Israel’s parliament would prevent UNRWA from continuing its essential work. Guterres said passage of the legislation would be “a catastrophe in what is already an unmitigated disaster.” As you worked in these hospitals in the north and south of Gaza, the role of UNRWA in helping them?

DR. BING LI: So, it’s extremely, extremely alarming that already when we were working in these hospitals, there’s already so little aid, so little supplies that are coming in. To take away what little is left is, essentially, again, a death sentence for anybody there who requires medical care, who requires this kind of help. When we were working in north Gaza — so, already in South Gaza — I spent two weeks in the south, when we first arrived. It’s already a very difficult place to work. It’s already overburdened. There’s already very few supplies. And then, when you go to the north, there’s even a fraction of that.

And I’m not surprised that the border has been difficult, that aid hasn’t been getting through, because I know we waited for hours, both ways, to be able to — allowed through. It’s extremely difficult for medical aid, for these teams to make it through. I think we were the first team in many months to make it to that area of the north.

And to dismantle UNRWA, which is the main support, the main lifeline for these Palestinians — even before the war, they were the ones that fed 50% of the population, provided services, provided education — it’s just another example of the violation of humanitarian law and these humanitarian rights.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Bing Li, I want to get to Lebanon — we only have a few minutes — where you are right now. Interestingly, you worked at Indonesian Hospital, which was originally set up by Indonesia for Gaza. And in the south of Lebanon, the two U.N. peacekeepers who were shot, who were injured, are Indonesian U.N. peacekeepers in southern Lebanon. But you’re in central Beirut, where a mass explosion rocked the city. Dozens of people were killed, more than a hundred injured. Can you describe the situation on the ground there?

DR. BING LI: So, a lot of anxiety, a lot of families that don’t know what is going to happen next, where they should go, if they should try to stay.

I’m here with MedGlobal at the moment, and we’re helping to build the healthcare capacity of Lebanon. I’m working with the Ministry of Public Health to try to bring in more supplies to help support the capacity of some hospitals that have been identified as those that will be most helpful in case these crises continue to happen, in case there continue to be mass casualties. And when this blast in Beirut happened, I was actually in Sidon, which is — in Saida, which is south, maybe about an hour south of Beirut, and talking to hospitals about their needs, doing needs assessments, and seeing what kind of services we can provide to those hospitals.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you so much for being with us, emergency medicine physician based in Arizona, who worked at the Indonesian Hospital in the north of Gaza and as a volunteer with Rahma Worldwide. She’s now in Beirut, Lebanon, volunteering with MedGlobal. Dr. Li is a U.S. Army veteran.

Coming up, the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded to a Japanese group of atomic bomb survivors. The head of the group has said Gaza today looks like Japan 80 years ago. Stay with us.