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Doctors Sarah Lalonde, Rizwan Minhas, and Yipeng Ge have all recently returned to Canada from volunteer medical delegations in Gaza with a harrowing message for the rest of the world. In this episode of The Marc Steiner Show, Marc speaks with all three doctors about what they saw and experienced attempting to provide medical care for patients in the midst of Israel’s genocidal slaughter of Palestinians.
Content Warning: This episode contains vivid descriptions of wartime conditions, genocide, violent physical injuries, and death.
Guest(s):
- Dr. Sarah LaLonde is an emergency and family physician specializing in community, rural, and remote emergency medicine, with a particular focus on Indigenous communities
- Dr. Rizwan Minhas is a Toronto-based physician specializing in sports and regenerative pain medicine, with extensive experience in emergency medicine.
- Dr. Yipeng Ge is a primary care physician and public health practitioner based on the traditional, unceded, and unsurrendered territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg in Ottawa, Canada.
Additional resources:
- CityNews, “Canadian doctors returning from Gaza detail eyewitness accounts: ‘We are telling the truth’”
- Global March to Gaza website
- Doctors Without Borders – Gaza: Life in a Death Trap
Credits:
- Studio Production: David Hebden
- Audio Post-Production: Alina Nehlich
Transcript
Marc Steiner: Welcome to The Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s great to have you all with us.
Today, we’re going to talk with three physicians who’ve just returned from Gaza. As we speak, Israel’s war in Gaza has killed at least 55,000. Palestinians, wounded over 125,000 more. This war began when 1,130 Israelis were killed or were held hostage. But now, this war is out of control. Every day, hundreds and hundreds of people are being decimated. And as we begin this conversation, 36 more people, non-combatants, were killed in Gaza.
Our guests today have vast experience in war zones and in disasters. Dr. Rizwan Minhas is a Toronto-based physician. He specializes in sports and regenerative pain medicine, but has extensive experience across the globe and is deeply committed to global humanitarian medical efforts.
Dr. Sarah LaLonde is an emergency and family physician who specializes in community, rural, and remote emergency medicine, especially in Indigenous communities. She’s worked in Albania, Togo, Chad, and fights against human trafficking in Quebec in Canada, and, of course, most recently came back from Gaza.
Yipeng Ge is a primary care physician and public health practitioner based in Ottawa, Canada. He currently works and lives on the traditional, unceded, and unsurrendered territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg. He practices family medicine and refugee health at community health centers there and across the country.
So, just once again, it’s a pleasure to have you all with us here. It’s also an honor for me to talk to the three of you, who sacrificed so much to be on the front lines in Gaza to save lives. As we begin to record today, I was just getting texts from another friend in Gaza who just said another 50 people, mostly women and children, have been killed as we are beginning this conversation right now. That’s just so important for people to realize that.
I’d like to step back for a minute, all three of you, and I’m really personally curious how and why you all ended up doing what you do, because it’s not as if you’re going into Gaza to come home and make thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars as a physician, and you’re going into a war zone, you’re going into a place where you may not come back from. So I’m very curious about all of you, what motivated you, what happened to put you into Gaza, into those front lines?
And we can start with you, Sarah, please.
Dr. Sarah LaLonde: Yeah, so my journey started in medical school. I had a lot of friends who were Jewish, and I became quite interested in the country of Israel because they were talking about their experiences living there, and many had been or were going, and that got me thinking about Israel.
At the end of my medical training, I decided to go to Israel. So I was there for about two weeks. And as the two weeks was finishing up, I had a really strong gut feeling that I should go on this tour that takes place in Hebron. So for those of us who are religious, that’s a place where Abraham, who’s the father of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, buried his wife, Sarah.
And that town is in the West Bank and has a very specific history. And basically in Hebron at that time when I visited, there was, I think, a few hundred or a few thousand settlers, there was, I think, about 3,000 soldiers to guard the settlers, and there was about 200,000 Palestinians. And the settlers and the Palestinians are living quite closely, some even literally on top of each other in apartment buildings, et cetera.
And while I was there, I was leaving the mosque, which is called the Ibrahimi Mosque, and I saw that the border police was angry, so I decided to hide. And while I was hiding, the Israeli border police killed a girl, a girl who was 17. She’s actually the same age as my brother. In Canada, we’re not very accustomed to gun violence. So that really shook me up to be so close to a shooting.
And then afterwards, because they closed the checkpoint, we were stuck on the Palestinian side of Hebron. And we went into a woman’s house, and she was supposed to be feeding us lunch, but she was very shook up because there had just been a person killed outside her house. And she was trying to manage her children, who were behaving like normal children, playing with their bikes inside the house, and she was trying to feed us lunch. Our guide saw the girl get shot, and he was also very shaken up.
So when I had that experience, it helped me understand the type of fear that someone might have when they live under occupation. And that got me interested in thinking about what it might be like to live or to experience occupation living in the West Bank. And then, that got me thinking about how I could contribute in the future as a physician, and one of those ways was by going to Gaza. So I was thinking of going to Gaza from 2016 until this year when I was honored to be able to go.
Marc Steiner: Yipeng?
Dr. Yipeng Ge: Similar to Sarah, actually, I visited that mosque in Hebron, Ibrahimi Mosque. I visited it back in March 2023. I was with many other Harvard graduate and undergraduate students who were visiting Palestine to understand the historical and political context of Palestine.
It was during that master’s that I was studying colonialism as a structural determinant of health. That’s actually been my own entry point into medicine and public health, learning about settler colonialism as it affects Indigenous, First Nations, Inuit, Métis peoples in Canada, or so-called Canada, as a settler-colonial state that has committed genocide of Indigenous peoples on this land.
And I didn’t choose to grow up in Canada. I came to Canada when I was four years old. And learning about the history of Indigenous peoples and the genocide of Indigenous peoples on this land, I felt very compelled to do what I can to understand that more and to think about what does it look like to decolonize and to dismantle these systems of oppression here.
And that really led me to the field of study and learning about colonialism in other contexts and how it is so interconnected in how people experience health or poor health. And to understand that was actually just part of my public health studies.
And during my own public health and preventive medicine training, I finished my family medicine training just two years ago, and it was during my public health and preventative medicine training that this increased violence in Gaza took place, about 20 months ago. And my university that I was training at actually suspended me for social media posts related to Palestine. And it was actually also photos from my own travels in Palestine just a few months before in that very year. And they later rescinded that suspension and then didn’t offer an apology.
And I’ve been continuously thinking about ways to put my energy and put my time to places and spaces that deserve it, including going to Gaza and offering what I could to be a witness to genocide as a family doctor.
Marc Steiner: Dr. Rizwan Minhas?
Dr. Rizwan Minhas: So, you know what? I wish I studied this beforehand, but I’m talking about the conflict beforehand. Before I knew there was a conflict, I wasn’t aware how the conflict was, what phase it was taking. But the reason I went there was because, from the fellow physicians that went there before me, they came back and they informed me of the stories that they were seeing, what they were seeing on the ground, that they were handling children with bullet wounds, they were handling children who needed amputations. There was no medical supply. But when I’m hearing these stories and when I was looking at the news, I was hearing something completely different.
So then as a fellow colleague to these physicians who did go there prior to my travel in April of 2024, I said, if this is true, I want to go see for myself, and I want to be able to provide at least some aid because there’s no independent journalism there. So I was trusting my fellow physicians.
And when I got there, I was shocked to see they were absolutely correct. So I went there just specifically to bring in some aid because at that time no aid was being allowed.
And while traveling, I took a flight from here to Egypt, Cairo, and then I took a bus from Egypt, Rafa, and we crossed to the Palestinian side, through the Rafah Palestinian side. And when I was crossing, I saw exactly what they said was true. There were thousands of trucks lined up and not one was being allowed through.
So then me and my fellow colleagues, we had about close to, I think, about $100,000 of medications that we took along. So, I went there just to provide some relief in regards to medical supplies and to provide relief to the doctors who are working tirelessly 24/7 and to give them a break. That was my main motivation for going there.
Marc Steiner: I really want to give people a sense of what you all experienced, the things that I’ve watched you talk about and read about that you did. It has to be one of the most profoundly difficult things to do, to be a physician, do the work you’re doing, and working in a place that is just being slaughtered and destroyed. And you’re in the middle of all this trying to heal it and save as many lives as you can.
And as I was reading about what you all did, it was almost difficult for me to comprehend in terms of what you experienced. I just would like you to all give a message to this world to make them really understand and hear and see how horrendous it is, what Gazans live through and what people are experiencing every day and the slaughter that is taking place. It’s almost unfathomable for me. It’s like a war beyond most wars that I’ve ever read about or experienced. And I know that it was all very emotional for all of you as well, despite the work you do. Let’s just rattle forth.
Rizwan, you want to begin?
Dr. Rizwan Minhas: Absolutely. It is tough talking about it, especially when you see it. You can’t unsee it. I want the world to know that — Trust me when I say this — We want independent journalism to be there because now it’s our word against what the Israeli media or the army is trying to tell you. And trust me, the two opposite statements can’t be correct.
I want them to know that all the doctors who’ve been there are seeing and are on the same page. This is a genocide happening, livestreamed. And yes, you can see it online, you can see dead babies online, but we actually are holding those dead babies with our hands. We’re actually treating those babies with bullet wounds. We’re actually treating older folks who are dying because of a lack of medication that could easily be treated.
I want them to know that this is not a battle of two religious sides or anything. This is just a battle of humanity. I had a fellow physician, Dr. Mark Palmiter, who is, I believe he’s of Jewish faith, and he was working alongside me over there, and our main focus was to save as many lives as we [could].
The thing is with doctors, we can’t stop a genocide. The political leaders around the world can. And I want the world to understand that yes, we may be able to provide aid, but you have to step up yourself and put pressure on your government and stand together with humanity and help stop this genocide that is happening during our lifetime.
Marc Steiner: What you just said, and Sarah, you can jump in here. It is our job at this moment, your job to tell your stories, our job is to get your stories told so that we shine light into this darkness, so we can do something to stop it. That’s part of what has to happen here.
Dr. Rizwan Minhas: Exactly.
Dr. Sarah LaLonde: Yeah, there’s so much that we can say that people should know about it. I think that it’s important to know, for people to understand the visceral feeling that you have when you go into Gaza. Gaza is a postapocalyptic world. When you go into Gaza, you feel like you’re in some type of a postapocalyptic film.
And I think that when we think about Gaza, we need to think about would we accept any of the things that we’re asking people in Gaza to accept? Like last week for example, we went to the Canadian Parliament, and there was a journalist there who asked us about tunnels being under the hospital. Now, this is a question that’s been repeated to many physicians. You can watch many, many, many interviews on YouTube where they asked physicians if they saw tunnels underneath the hospital. And we did not see tunnels.
However, even if there were tunnels, does that justify the bombing of hospitals? Would we accept, let’s say, my nephew was in the hospital, and I find out my nephew was killed while he was in the hospital by a bomb, and someone said, oh, there was a tunnel underneath the hospital, so that’s why we bombed the hospital. Would we accept that? Would we accept that for our own children? Would we accept that for our Indigenous people that we would bomb… I work up north in Cree Nation and with the Inuit, that we would accept that we would bomb the Cree Regional Hospital?
And ironically, after we had that conversation, we discovered that there were tunnels underneath the building where we did the press conference. We walked through them as we were going to another building. But do you think that, as Canadians, we would accept that someone would bomb our Parliament because there were tunnels underneath it?
So, I think that a lot of what we’re asking, what the world is asking Gazans to accept is not something we would accept for ourselves or our children. We have access to direct news because we’ve been to Gaza and we know people there, and a few times a week I receive videos of people being burnt alive, like more than once a week. Would we accept that our children in Canada would be burnt alive on a regular basis? I don’t think we would accept that.
And I think when it comes to the land piece of it, after the world decided to create Israel, it was created after the Arab-Israeli war, there was 22% of the land that was given to the Palestinian people. And that’s the land where these crimes are being committed.
And when we talk about forcible displacement, they’re asking those people to move off of their land. That would be like if Canada said to the Inuit people, oh, we don’t like having you here in northern Quebec, so we’re going to put you on a train and we’re going to send you to America. Well, I don’t think there’s very many Canadians that would find that to be acceptable.
So we have to think about, first of all, there’s international law, and we can talk about what is OK and what is not OK according to international law. But on a more visceral and gut and human feeling, we have to think about whether we would accept any of that for someone that we love.
Marc Steiner: Yipeng?
Dr. Yipeng Ge: Reflecting on Sarah’s words, I think it’s really important that I think about the context and framework of settler colonialism because I agree with Sarah in all of these really important questions. And how has this happened to this extent? And to be able to see settler colonialism in its brutal, vicious, overt form of genocide is only possible because of this really pervasive dehumanization, not only through politic and rhetoric, but through very real actions on the Palestinian indigenous land and body.
And we’ve seen that too in the context of Canada, right? That Indigenous children have been starved in Canada by policies set by the first prime minister of this country, Sir John A. McDonald, to be able to displace Indigenous peoples off of their land into reservations.
But I think, at least for me, it’s different because I’ve learned about settler colonialism in almost this sterile, academic environment. And the ways in which it feels and acts in Canada and the US is still very pervasive, but is not this overt violence and brutality on a body. And we see it in resource grabs and decimating the land here, but to see it also firsthand in Palestine, I’ve also seen it in the West Bank, the demolitions of homes and the displacement of people from their villages that they’ve lived for generations.
But to see it in Gaza, it helps a sliver to understand that this is settler colonialism. But it does something, I think, to my soul, to our souls, of seeing this, that this is what humans are capable of. And unfortunately, it’s a reminder of what humans have been capable of since time existed, perhaps, because these atrocities in the form of holocausts and genocides have happened in the past and are actually happening in other parts of the world.
But I think the tagline for me is to know that Canada is so heavily complicit in what’s happening, and that’s what we tried to highlight last week. And it’s also something that a lot of parliamentarians and policymakers, they don’t even think is true because they are being fed inaccurate information from the minister of Foreign Affairs, or minister of Industry now, about how Canada is still heavily complicit.
They canceled 30 permits for military technology that goes to Israel last year, but there’s still around 88% of existing permits of these technologies that go to Israel, including technology that goes from Canada to the US, such as engine sensors built in Ottawa, built in Ottawa, the only engine sensors that fit the F-35 fighter jets that are built in the US by Lockheed Martin. Those engine sensors are made by a company called Gastops in Ottawa. And those F-35s are the same fighter jets dropping 2,000 pound bombs on Palestinian children, women, men, and families, and they’re the ones that come into the hospitals, sometimes dead on arrival.
So to understand that complicity, I think it’s really compelling for us to know what is our responsibility, for example, as a Canadian, to push for ending this kind of complicity.
Marc Steiner: I think that the work you’ve done, what you’ve written, what you have been interviewed about, what you’ve told people you’ve seen, should be opening doors to that idea at this moment.
And all of you having grown up in a medical world, I know what you see every day is seeing people in deep pain, lives in trouble, and you do your best to put your knowledge to work to save lives. But I don’t think people really understand or get what the three of you saw, what the three of you experienced in Gaza, no matter what you’ve done before.
When I interview people in Gaza, there’s one interviewee I’ve been desperately trying to get back to. I don’t know what happened to him, but we tried to follow his life. And to people that don’t really understand the depth of destruction and depravity that’s taking place that you all just came back from, how do we begin to relate that to people in terms of your experiences?
Dr. Yipeng Ge: I think it’s just so indescribable. I think we can sit here all day to go through all the ways in which life has been completely and utterly decimated. If we think about all the conditions of life that are needed to sustain life in Gaza being targeted and destroyed, it becomes really, really hard for someone living on this side of the world to fully grasp that and understand that. I don’t think I can even grasp it in this moment because I go to work here, and then I go home, and I have food on the table, I can go buy stuff from the grocery store. All of those things have been fully broken, and the ways in which people live their lives have been fully broken.
I just want to share, the things that I learned in medical school I was hoping to use even a little bit in the clinics that I worked at in Rafah, but it was really incomparable to what was absolutely needed. What was needed was food. What was needed was water. What was needed was medicines. These were things that were not even available. And to be faced with starving children on the brink of death, severe malnutrition, we didn’t even learn about things in a comprehensive way in medical school about severe malnutrition or something like rickets disease where your bones don’t even develop properly because you have vitamin D deficiency. But these were the things that we were already seeing. And that was like a year ago in Gaza.
Marc Steiner: Rizwan, you were about to jump in. Please do.
Dr. Rizwan Minhas: What Dr. Yipeng said, it’s hard to put into words what you see that you can’t unsee, and it’s hard to even to put into words. But just for example, so I went to the European Gaza Hospital — And this is only one side of the story because then you have the rest of the population, there is some population that’s even more north, there’s some population that was in Rafah, and there’s some population that was around the European Gaza Hospital.
Once you enter the hospital, people are trying to crowd themselves around the hospital just for safety because they think that they’ll be safe around the hospital setting, which has now [been] found to be not true because they can target hospitals anytime they want to.
When I was entering, actually, what happened was there was the World Central Kitchen trucks that were with us at the border, and they were a few minutes ahead of us while we were entering, and they were the first to be targeted. And one of our fellow Canadians, Jacob Flickinger was in that van working with World Central Kitchen. And when we found out about it, then we’re like, OK, so we’re entering now. This could be us as well.
So right from the start, you realize that your life is in their hands with the press of a button. When you enter the hospital setting, you realize this is a population with a 90% literacy rate, and now they’re out looking for food for their children. Every person that I saw, every third person I saw had yellow eyes that showed that they had jaundice, likely from contaminated hepatitis water. There’s no water, there’s no food, and there’s no aid. There’s nothing getting through to the borders.
In regards to the medical side of things, there is a lack of supplies. We had to choose who we would give oxygen to, who we would give the last few IV antibiotics to. We had two people, I wasn’t working in the ICU, but I would go to the ICU, transfer patients to the ICU. There was a girl, which we did a newspaper on over there, and she was in the ICU, and she was intubated, but because of the lack of pain medication, she was always in pain. She was just hurling around in bed all day for 24 hours. And we had no IV set of antibodies, but we just didn’t want to lose hope.
Every day we used to go and check up on her, and she was always in pain, and you could tell she was in pain because she would try to extubate herself at the same time she would be screaming in pain all night, and we had to make a decision, should we give her a chance? Should we wait? Maybe some supplies might enter, maybe there’s the news that Israel is allowing aid to get through, medical supplies at least, to get through. But that news never came. And the day I was leaving, it was also the last day that she actually, they could not survive without the pain medication or lack of medical supplies.
And it hurts because in a situation like in Canada, that 4-year-old girl’s life could have been easily saved. And listen, there’s so many kids over there with no surviving family. So the only people they have [are] the nurses and the medical people around, and maybe they might be lucky to find a family friend that’s around them as well. So it’s a tough situation, hard to describe, and it’s not like it’s not known, and now it’s everywhere on the internet. But the problem, the thing with us is we’ve seen it firsthand.
Marc Steiner: Sarah, I want you to jump in here, please. I might just give a thought. It was hard to listen to that. People have to hear it. The three of you are physicians who have seen some horrendous things in your lives working with patients, but to experience the horror of that little girl you were just talking about, and that’s expanded 10,000, 20,000 times inside Gaza, I think people need to hear and understand the depth of that pain and what we’re allowing to happen. I didn’t mean to sit there and preach, just it grabbed me very deeply, what you said.
Sarah, I’ve seen doctors work on people who come out of accidents that happened in communities like ours where we all live, but what you all experienced and have seen is something way beyond that. And so it’s your own personal journey through that, and what you came away with, and how you survived it?
Dr. Sarah LaLonde: Well, of course, I could talk about many things. I was working at European Gaza Hospital when we received the Palestinian prisoners that were given in exchange during the month of February during the so-called ceasefire. And I could talk about the state of the prisoners. I could talk about all the patients that we saw who were affected by quadcopters or snipers or unexploded ordinances or missiles. I could also talk about the colleagues.
But part of the conversation that I think is often missing is our experiences as international doctors in the hospital. And I think what really changed me when I went to Gaza was my experience of the kindness and the welcoming by the national staff.
I remember that I was sad one day. I went outside and I was standing, it was raining. And I had eaten with most of the people in the department. They all knew me. So, the security guards or the people who do the welcoming of the patients and triage, they saw me. They looked out the window and they saw me and they said, Dr. Sarah, are you OK? Are you OK? Let us pass you a chair. So they passed me a chair through the window.
So, then I sat on the chair. So, then they said, are you OK? Are you OK? Can we give you some tea? So I said, OK, thanks for the tea. So, they gave me tea. So, then after that they said, well, if you’re having tea, you need to have some kind of chocolate with your tea. Can we give you a chocolate? So, then they gave me a chocolate through the window.
And I think that the profound kindness and welcoming and the treatment of guests was something that I was so touched by. And as I think about what we’re often taught as children, I guess teaching in every family is different, but in my family, it was that love is about putting the other person before yourself or that thinking about the good of the other or being attentive to what they might want or need in that moment. And that’s something that I experienced all the time there.
I was so touched, at the end of my time there I offered to extend, and I spoke with my boss about that. And you have to keep in mind that my boss was the only physician there during the mass casualty events last year. He was there with a bunch of medical students. He lived in the hospital and he saw every mass casualty event. So I asked him, do you need some help? Do you want me to stay longer?
And he answered my question in a very polite but roundabout way. He said that he had experienced romantic love in his life, but that the romantic love that he experienced will never, ever, ever compare to the love that he has for his daughter. And then he said to me, your dad’s worried about you. You should go home.
So to think that my boss was caring about the feelings of another man that he’s never met while undergoing a genocide and being afraid for his children’s lives, having lost everything, displaced multiple times, huge financial loss, huge personal loss.
The healthcare workers in Gaza, they’re experiencing the genocide on two levels. They go to work, they try to manage the mass casualty events. They try to save as many people. Some of my male colleagues admitted to me that they felt so hopeless after the mass casualty events that they were crying.
And after all that, they go home and they experience the genocide in their own lives they’re living. Most of them are living in tents, they don’t have electricity, they don’t have access to water. They’ve experienced, they’ve lost friends, they’ve lost family members. And despite all of that, they’re coming to work and they’re taking great care of patients, and they’re treating us like guests, even though our country is directly involved in killing their friends. And I think that that’s something that really changed me.
Marc Steiner: Before we round this up a bit, I want a closing thought from each one of you. But Yipeng, let me just ask, I understand you’re going back to Gaza soon, is that right?
Dr. Yipeng Ge: The intention is not to go into Gaza. I’ll be with a global march to Gaza. So we have, I believe, over 50 country delegations now, and we are expecting thousands of people arriving in Egypt to go from Cairo to El-Arish, which is a few kilometers away from the Rafah border between Egypt and Gaza Palestine.
And the goal will be to march and to protest at the Rafah border crossing to demand that the thousands of trucks that are still waiting at that border to be let in with food, water, fuel, medical aid, and supplies, that that needs to enter to end the genocide, to end the famine and the starvation.
And I think we are at this pivotal moment where hundreds of thousands, if not the majority of the population [is] facing extermination because of this months-long blockade on top of an existing 18-year blockade of essential foods and supplies and medicines.
So people are on a razor-thin thread of survival at this moment. And I think citizens and people of conscience around the world are really unsure what else there is to do. We have organized as best as we could in different parts of the world, especially the countries that are most complicit, like the UK, France, Canada, Australia, the US, and we’ve done our press conferences, we’ve done our letters, we’ve done our petitions, we’ve done it, and we’ve done direct actions, we’ve done it all.
And I think this feels like a very pivotal moment where people are descending on the Rafah border to say, enough is enough. We haven’t seen meaningful action from these most complicit parties to prevent and end this genocide and end this famine. And as people, we are going to try to do this on our own in the same way that the Freedom Flotilla has tried multiple times, and now they are, I think, very close to reaching the beaches of Gaza.
So I think it’s a reflection of nothing in this world, whether it be civil rights or equal human rights, if we can even call it that on this side of the world, nothing has been just granted to people. It has always been fought for by the people. And this is another example of that.
Marc Steiner: When is that taking place?
Dr. Yipeng Ge: The goal is to march to the Rafah border crossing June 15.
Marc Steiner: So, as we conclude this and let you all go back to your day, I know you’re busy. One of the things you said, Sarah, I was curious about, we hear about the resilience of the Palestinian people, and I wonder when you are there and reflect on it now, where you see the hope, where you see the possibility of this ending and how we end it and how we build something new and how not to give up hope.
Dr. Sarah LaLonde: Well, first I’ll talk about resilience, then I’ll talk about hope. So I don’t think that we should be talking about resilience while there are ongoing atrocities. I don’t think that resilience… I have a lot of resistance to the use of the word resilience when we’re talking about something that’s manmade because it takes the responsibility off of the perpetrator and puts it onto the victim.
And this is not what the insurance companies call an act of God. This is a choice. We saw all the trucks outside of Gaza as we went in. It’s very easy to get water and food into Gaza. It’s easy. Many of these problems could be solved within a few hours if there was the political will to do that.
So I don’t want to focus on the Palestinian resilience. I want to focus on what we can do to come alongside people in need and to do that in a way that respects their sovereignty, to say, how can we come along [with] you? What do you want us to do for you or with you, and how can we help? And I think that that’s how we need to be responding.
When it comes to hope, I think that hope is a choice. So, love is a choice, and hope is a choice. So as I come alongside my Palestinian colleagues, my patients, the nurses, and all the people of Palestine and of Gaza, I’ve taken a decision to cling to hope even at the darkest moments when I am receiving those videos of people being burnt alive.
This week, I found out that one of my colleagues had his leg blown off at the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation distribution that happened. I found out that another friend of a friend was killed by missile when he went to go pick up his food at the GHF distribution. And that type of grieving is hard for me, and I’m only experiencing one millionth of what my Palestinian friends, colleagues, patients are experiencing.
So to summarize, I am willing to choose hope even at times when hope is not saying that there is a probability that everything is going to go amazing, but for me, hope is a choice.
Marc Steiner: Rizwan, you’re up.
Dr. Rizwan Minhas: I would like to comment on two things Sarah mentioned about the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, known as the GHF, and understand that this was backed by [the] US and Israel only to distribute aid into Gaza. It was a failed operation, which was marred by violence and mismanagement. And not many other humanitarian organizations even want to deal with them or collaborate with them because they knew it would fail. And it did fail. Not only did it fail, it actually led into violence and killing of more Palestinians who were just there to grab aid for their families. So it’s just tough to talk about this. Anyways, it was a failed operation.
In regards to blockade, I know we kept talking about blockade of supplies, but there’s a blockade of medical personnel getting in. There’s a blockade of journalism getting in. In the medical world, we had three rejections. The head of Glia just informed us, who was Dr. Dorotea, she had three rejections. And before that, there was another organization that had nine out of 10 people rejected from doctors coming into Gaza to provide medical relief.
In regards to hope, I don’t want to talk about the Palestine [inaudible], like Sarah said, because they are a resilient group. That’s their faith. Their faith tells them that despair is a sign of disbelief and that hope is a hallmark of faith. So, they’re never going to give up hope. And so for such people, you can never defeat them.
From our standpoint, there’s always hope. Because if you don’t have hope, then you let injustice win. And what you see, what we’ve seen, you can never let that happen. There’s hope whenever they pull a child out of the rubble and he smiles back at you. Those images are tough to look at, but they’re there. And without hope, we let injustice win. So there will be hope until we succeed in having a free Palestinian state.
Marc Steiner: I want to thank the three of you deeply for what you’ve done, what you’re doing, and for joining us today, and the stories and wisdom that you all have shared in this conversation. I hope we can all just stay in touch. I’m serious about that, because this is something that we have to be unified together to stop.
And I just really do want to thank you for the sacrifices you’ve made, putting your lives on the line in danger, and bringing back the stories that we need to hear and healing people in the process. So thank you all very much for being here.
Dr. Sarah LaLonde: It was an honor. Thank you for having us.
Dr. Yipeng Ge: Thank you.
Marc Steiner: Thank you once again. Let me thank our guests, doctors Sarah LaLonde, Yipeng Ge, and Rizwan Minhas for joining us and for all the work they do, putting their lives on the line, literally putting their lives on the line in Gaza to save people’s lives.
And here in Baltimore, let’s say thanks to David Hebden for running the program today, our audio editor Alina Nehlich for working her magic, Rosette Sewali for producing The Marc Steiner Show and putting up with me, and the tireless Kayla Rivara for making it all work behind the scenes. And everyone here at The Real News for making this show possible.
Please let me know what you thought about what you heard today, what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at mss@therealnews.com and I’ll get right back to you.
Once again, thank you to the three physicians for their work, for joining us here today on The Marc Steiner Show. So, for the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved, keep listening, and take care.
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