Last week, Vice President Kamala Harris and her vice presidential running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz projected a message of unity and hope during the Democratic party convention in Chicago. But while there was a feeling of optimism among thousands of convention delegates about the party’s prospects in this November’s election, Palestinian Americans were feeling anger and frustration over party officials’ rejection of their request for a speaker to address the convention about the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza.
The group that requested the speaker, The Uncommitted National Movement, received more than half a million anti-war votes in Democratic Party primary elections across several states.
Over the past 10 months after the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel that killed 1,200 and kidnapped 240 hostsages, more than 40,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children have been killed by Israeli airstrikes and ground assaults using bombs and missiles supplied by the U.S. Six American doctors who had recently volunteered to provide life-saving health care to Gaza residents travelled to the Chicago convention to directly appeal to Democratic party officials to allow one of them to speak to the nation about the humanitarian catastrophe they witnessed in Gaza.
Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with one of those physicians, Dr. Ahmad Yousaf, a pediatrician from Arkansas, who recounts his harrowing three-week experience earlier this summer when he volunteered in Gaza to provide critical health care in Al-Aqsa Hospital’s intensive care unit and emergency room.
DR. AHMAD YOUSAF: When I entered Gaza, I knew things were going to be bad. Tut immediately the thing that hit me hard and every doctor and every humanitarian that was with me was that what we were seeing was truly unfathomable in terms of the extent of the destruction. You know, I can’t truly articulate, feeling like I was in a post-apocalyptic zombie movie in terms of how much destruction. Every building in Rafah, which is the southernmost part of Gaza, all the way to Khan Yunis, which is just north of that into the middle area where I was. Every building up until the Deir al Blah was on the ground destroyed in some capacity, uninhabitable.
People living on the street under rubble, trying their best to survive. All water infrastructure destroyed. Every hospital I saw, destroyed. Every police station I saw, destroyed. Every mosque and church on the ground. The level of devastation made me realize two things really quickly: One was that I was never truly going to be able to convey to the justice of what I was seeing, because there are no words and even videos that could truly do justice to what we saw.
And the only way that was ever going to be truly visible to the world was whenever the ceasefire is had. And international journalists like yourself who are a third party— I’m not a journalist. None of the doctors want to be journalists. We aren’t good at that. I’m not particularly good at this part. And unfortunately, we were all forced to because of the reality of how severe the level of brutality and carnage was.
There was no CNN, no NBC, no BBC on the ground because they’ve been restricted. And to me, that is telling. It was all by design. There’s very few international eyes in this because if people saw what I saw, their hearts would turn the way mine did. The pit in their stomach would get deeper and we would all be in a very different state of affairs in terms of our understanding of our obligation as a country and as humanity, and how to address what’s going on there.
Beyond the bombs that are dropping 24/7 while we were there, we can hear bombs like rolling thunder and the drones above our head that sound like a lawnmower. Beyond all this for 10 months, there’s been no access to medical supplies or consistent sources of acceptable levels of nutrition or safe water.
And so what we saw was not just in the patients, but in my fellow healthcare workers, the true Gazan heroes that the physicians and the nursing staff that every single person I met was malnourished to some level. Every doctor, they would joke around about how they were swimming in their own clothes because they had lost 30 and 40 kg. That’s 60, 70, 80 pounds of weight over 10 months because they haven’t had consistent — they were eating white rice, if they were able to get it from humanitarian aid packages previously.
And before this current escalation on Oct. 7th and beyond, before that, the guys and people since 2005 put on what many people locally and in Israel called the Gazan diet, right? They had a caloric restriction per citizen in Gaza before October. This is before the Oct. 7th attack by Hamas, OK? And so this is just an exacerbation on a chronic problem.
And that’s what this felt like. Every possible sociological and kind of infrastructure disease — if you want to use that word, that’s a word I would use — that was allowed to fester pre- this attack, pre-Oct. 7th is now in full exacerbation. People do not have medication. We saw people at the end stages of the disease processes like kidney disease and diabetes.
We saw people because of the level of malnourishment, they were dying of simple illnesses, including diarrheal illnesses they were getting because the water was simply contaminated and there was no source of clean water consistently.
And finally, right — the most recent kind of horror and all this is we were seeing diseases that had been obliterated in the world by the public health system internationally. Polio, that could only exist in two environments: One where we’ve completely destroyed the infrastructure of health care delivery that was considered standard in even the poorest and most underserved places on Earth, things like vaccines that are free because of the organizations that exist in the world, and in combination with a level of malnourishment and malnutrition that allows for very simple childhood diseases to progress to end stage disease.
And so it doesn’t shock me that we see polio. It doesn’t shock me that we saw kids and infants dying of simple pediatric illnesses because they were in a state of affairs where they didn’t have access to the simple things that keep us alive, like clean water and nutrition.
SCOTT HARRIS: Dr. Yousaf, you were part of a group of six doctors who had volunteered in Gaza that came to the Chicago Convention to hold a press conference. What was your message then to the Democratic party and the nation about the role of the Biden administration and our military in supporting Israel’s brutal war in Gaza, and what was your reaction when the organizers of the Democratic Convention denied your request?
DR. AHMAD YOUSAF: You know, the people on the side of the aisle that must be for humanitarian aid to vulnerable people, you would think it would be the Democrats. But unfortunately, the administration that currently sits in office has put us in a situation where we’re choosing between somebody who articulates the desire to support genocide in the Republican candidate and somebody who, for the last ten months has supported genocide for the last 10 months with financial and verbal and in every way support that you could possibly imagine.
And so I was left unsurprised because you can only judge people for what they do and not to what they say. And for the last 10 months, we’ve had an example of what Joe Biden and his platform has represented. And unfortunately, it appears based upon the response of the vice president’s party ticket and platform at the DNC, is that we’re just moving into an environment where for the next four years we’ll either be dealing with this on the MAGA side or on the Democratic side.
And that’s an unfortunate reality. And it’s something that anybody who’s anti-genocide unfortunately has come to get used to at this point in our country.
Listen to Scott Harris’ in-depth interview with Dr. Ahmad Yousaf (26:45) and see more articles and opinion pieces in the Related Links section of this page.
For the best listening experience and to never miss an episode, subscribe to Between The Lines on your favorite podcast app or platform.
Or subscribe to our Between The Lines and Counterpoint Weekly Summary.
