Skip to content
“You do hear complaints about Hamas. But you hear complaints about the U.S., you hear complaints about the U.N., you hear complaints about life. People feel that they've been left. People feel that their humanity is not recognized. People feel that they're abandoned and left to the slaughter, and when you have to live a life where there is no sense of safety day in, day out, I can understand that.”
Dr. Javid Abdelmoneim

Interviewer: Welcome to the program. You hear this, you know, obviously since you’ve come out, this latest strike has happened. When you hear both the Americans and the Israelis saying all the same things they said over and over again, how do you react, given what you’ve seen there?
Dr Javid Abdelmoneim: Christian, it’s very hard. I mean, I’m in a period I’ve only just left Gaza, and I think for a little bit of self-preservation, I’m walling off my emotions. My reaction is one of feeling of sickness. I feel sick. This has been my seventh war with MSF, and it’s been unique. The number of civilians killed, the number of children, the fact that they can’t move to safety, has been unique for me. And that’s something that’s really what I want people to understand. Because when you’re there in Al-Mawasi, in Khan Yunis, you can see the Navy ships on the sea and you can see the Apache helicopters and […] the fighter jets. The drones are a constant. Aou know the sounds of the quadcopters, you learn very quickly all day to differentiate the difference between shelling from warships, or quadcopters, or Apache guns. And this is happening all the time. And then you work and there are mass casualty, after mass casualty, after mass casualty of people, living in a so called safe zone.
Interviewer: You talked about Khan Yunis and yet again there are orders for civilians I think – I mean, nearly 70,000 or so are being told to move from one end of the city to the other. Again. It just keeps on happening. What is that toll on the people? I mean, you know, we look at it from outside and it’s just, you know, a lot of people moving. But how do people process being told to move, every other week, it seems?
Dr Javid Abdelmoneim: Yeah, my colleagues alone, some of them were displaced, forcibly displaced in this way four times in the eight weeks that I was there, and these are healthcare workers and the whole population, you know, they’re amongst them. It’s a form of harassment, there’s an instability, there’s a lack of safety for the children and the people. If you have to, and sometimes the evacuation orders come in, and the violence, the military action starts immediately. So it’s a real rush, and you see just thousands of people in the images that the world has seen, and traffic runs to a standstill, and you see the look of despair and fear in people’s faces. And the space to which people can move is ever, ever more constant. You’ve got a huge concentration of people in a tiny space. Which, before the Rafah invasion of early May, was essentially a strip of sand. So the services in those areas are not fit for purpose. So hygiene, sanitation, these are all leading to diseases and illnesses that shouldn’t happen. So there’s a lack of safety, a lack of hygiene and sanitation.
Interviewer: I listened to, I mean, honestly for me, it was shocking and an extraordinary, quote unquote, interview on the BBC with an Israeli spokesperson laying in to a very distinguished BBC reporter when she was asking about the civilian casualties, and repeating what local Palestinian doctors were saying about this latest attack. He called her a pro-Palestinian propagandist. It was truly awful, and I just wonder, though, when you see what’s going on, and you know that Hamas is there, and they’ve even reported it themselves, what do you see in these civilian shelter areas? Do you see armed men? Do you see… Can you distinguish between who and what?
Dr Javid Abdelmoneim: I’ve not seen armed men and I’ve not seen any military action in and amongst the tents. So when you’re at work, I’ve certainly not seen any military action or armed men within the hospital grounds. I have witnessed, however, strikes from the Israelis in the so-called humanitarian zones where people are living. One of those strikes was at the wall of the ICRC compound. These cause mass casualties, they aren’t anywhere safe, and that’s why we ask for a ceasefire as MSF. Because we can’t practice safely, and people are coming into a health service that is on its knees. So I have not seen military action in and amongst the tents, and I’ve not seen military action in hospitals.
Interviewer: We’re showing some of your video. Give us a little description of what we’re seeing, what you photographed there.
[…]
Dr Javid Abdelmoneim: you’ve got blood on the floor, you’ve got people working and you’ve got injured people coming in. When I tell you that these mass casualties- for example, on July the 13th was 189 injured people and 55 dead. On July 22nd, 265 injured people and over 80 dead. This is a huge influx of children, of healthcare workers, in the mass casualty on the July 13th. The second wave of injured coming in were uniformed ambulance workers. It’s so shocking for someone who’s been in a war, to see health care workers coming in like that.
Interviewer: I was going to say, it’s one of the grimmest places for health care workers as well. They have been, well, some targeted, some killed in the crossfire, killed in the event. How do the people who you work with keep up their endurance and keep their, you know, moral and professional duty to do no harm and to keep trying to help people survive under these circumstances?
Dr Javid Abdelmoneim: I think we’re all medics at core, and you go to work, and there’s a huge element of stiff upper lip amongst my colleagues, and, you know… the number of times I’ve seen them shaking eyes, pupils dilated, fear because of an evacuation order, a strike near where they were living that meant they had to displace and move somewhere for safety one night and the next day they’re at work. Or for example in middle of an evacuation order, for example July 22nd, large evacuation order for eastern parts of Khan Yunis, rolling mass casualty all day. I look up from my mass casualty and there’s a colleague there who I know shouldn’t be there and I ask them why you’re there and their brother and his children and their collective home had been struck that day. Or I go back to the ward and the physiotherapist or the counsellor, both in tears, what’s happened? Our families are calling us from that evacuation zone, they can’t move out of the building, they can see Israeli tanks, they don’t feel safe to come. So even though you’re professional, you’re working, you’re coming to work, you have an armor, you steel yourself. There are moments where it penetrates you, it penetrates you and it really takes you aback. And people are expressing to me, when they express any emotion, are expressing to me that they’d rather just die. They’re waiting for death. They’ve lost hope, and that’s preferable to what they’re going through with the serial displacements and the lack of safety.
Interviewer: In your experience, and you’ve said this is your seventh war and you’ve been in countless disaster zones for MSF, you know, all the records are being broken, so to speak, in Gaza, the most ordnance in the smallest territory in this number of months has been dropped. What, in your experience, does that mean for the future? Let’s say the guns fall silent. What happens the day after?
Dr Javid Abdelmoneim: Two or three things. I think one thing I’d like to say is, for example, the Nuseirat hostage rescue was June 8th. We only discharged our last child from that ward, from our ward, a trauma unit that we’re running with the Ministry of Health and MSF, on July the 20th, June the 8th to July 20th. This is a child who had a left forearm amputation and a shattered femur with an external fixator metalwork still on at the time of discharge. He also had such a severe concussion that he had seizures still smiling.
Interviewer: these were the casualties of the crossfire during the rescue
Dr Javid Abdelmoneim: absolutely. So this is someone who’s been in hospital more than 40 days, a family that are affected in that way. And that’s one child of how many injured. And we mustn’t then forget the mental the trauma, the mental ill-health that all Gazans are going through. So when the guns stop, everything that we’re seeing now, it’s not over. These people need rehabilitation. They need to regain their sense of safety. Some restorative justice would be a good thing, too.
Interviewer: I want to ask you something. As you know, Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing, far-right allies, have talked about ‘total victory’. And there seems to be an Israeli report that’s saying the defense minister, Yoav Galant, who also was speaking like that at the very beginning, has now said that total victory or absolute victory against Hamas is, quote, “a nonsense.” He’s criticizing the prime minister, and I just wondered how you view it. I’m not asking you politically, but do you see areas that are so-called cleared of Hamas? Is it getting any less Hamas, or what? Because from what we gather, obviously the evacuation orders, the striking of this, the striking of that, means that these people are still there, it’s like whack-a-mole. Dr Javid Abdelmoneim: That’s how I see it, because the evacuation orders and the areas where you’re getting strikes are repeating themselves. So even in Gaza City in the north where we had a clinic, there were more evacuation orders. Now in Khan Yunus, back and forth, Khan Yunus was cleared much earlier this year. So them coming back to Khan Yunus to have to do any more military action was a surprise, and if that’s an indication that Hamas are coming back, well then, it’s an indication that Hamas are coming back where they were cleared. The consequence is that somewhere that was deemed safe or cleared, people moved back and then when there’s a strike there again, that’s why nowhere is safe.
Interviewers: Do you hear from people at all, I don’t know whether they would confide in you, but we do hear stories, we do hear reports there – occasionally when polls can be taken – more and more Gazans are also blaming Hamas for their plight. They’re just angry now. And we hear in leaked testimony, not testimony, but leaked messages from the Hamas people that, you know, this war has to continue, etc., etc. Do you, what do you hear from Gazans? Who do they hold responsible as well?
Dr Javid Abdelmoneim: I do hear, in an evacuation moment where you see you know people moving and, you do hear – and I speak Arabic so I understand – so you do hear complaints about Hamas. But you hear complaints about the U.S., you hear complaints about the U.N., you hear complaints about life. People feel that they’ve been left. People feel that their humanity is not recognized. People feel that they’re abandoned and left to the slaughter, and when you have to live a life where there is no sense of safety day in, day out, I can understand that.
Interviewer: and as well as the, you know, deaths and casualties from actually being, you know, hit by all sorts of ordnance, there is a situation where there’s little clean water, there’s little food, the pipeline has not been significantly expanded. And we’re hearing talk about diseases and skin diseases and air and waterborne, you know, pestilence. What have you seen? The pictures are terrible. Irritated skin.
Dr Javid Abdelmoneim: Yeah, so in the primary health care centers that we’re running, amongst the five top diagnoses, four of them skin infections, scabies infestation and eye infections and diarrheal infections. These are all water and sanitation related and that’s a sure sign to say that hygiene, sanitation and clean water is not there.
Interviewer: I’m seeing these pictures now. It’s just dreadful.
Dr Javid Abdelmoneim: And now of course, and there’s been hepatitis A all along and we’ve had children dying of hepatitis A. in our pediatric units but now of course the ugly head of polio rearing itself in Gaza. This is a waterborne disease, this was eradicated in Gaza. The prospect of having to do a polio max vaccination campaign in that insecure environment. I don’t think it can be done.
Interviewer: I mean, there’s just going to be so much fallout even if the guns ever fall silent. I want to ask you finally what you did, what you have seen – because you know, we hear from the Israelis that they are letting goods in, we hear from Gazans that they’re not getting enough goods in. And that incredibly right-wing finance minister you know Smotrych has said in a speech that quote “it may just be just and moral to starve Gazan residents in the war against Hamas,” but says, “No one in the world would let us” and he’s talking about two million people, “until the hostages were released.” So many people have condemned those, so many of the allies. So what are you seeing about aid and that lot, and how do you react to that kind of comment?
Dr Javid Abdelmoneim: for the supplies, we’ve not had enough, we’ve not had the supplies we need. For example, through the two months that I was there, we had to either economize what we use or manufacture. We had to make surgical gowns and make crutches from local markets. We ran out of ibuprofen, simple, simple painkillers. We were very low on Fentanyl and there was a bartering that you do with other organisms. So supplies were a constant battle and there are first and second and third order ramifications of running low on something else or using other things. Fuel at one point at the beginning of July, the Ministry wasn’t getting enough fuel in and this meant that we could do less in the operating theatres, water wasn’t being pumped onto the wards. How do you clean a ward without water? So these are the things and challenges that are consistent. For example, one of my shipments which should have gone in really just before the Rafa offensive in the beginning of May, to the date that I left, July the 31st, still hadn’t completely arrived, and that’s just one shipment. And that’s why we were constantly patching together what we can do. And that’s taking up your headspace. When you have to spend each day working out what drug should we use instead, and so forth, you’re not paying attention to quality of care for example.
Interviewer: you briefly mentioned the toll it took on you, how are you after these two months?
Dr Javid Abdelmoneim: I’m okay, I I’ve been in many wars. I think Gaza, this experience has been very difficult for me because seeing my colleagues go through it and live it in real time has been very hard.
Interviewer: Doctor, thank you so much indeed for being with us.
Dr Javid Abdelmoneim: Thank you.

Drone / QuadcopterMass CasualtySafe ZonesForced DisplacementHostage Rescue OperationWaterHygiene IssuesHumanitarian CrisisDiseasePublic HealthMedical SuppliesPsychological TraumaMSF - Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders)HamasICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross)Al MawasiKhan YounisNuseirat Refugee Camp