Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Were you able to go back to the some of the same places, or see some of the same people that you had seen on your first mission at all?
Dr. Mohammad Subeh: Rafah I had just left, you know, a couple of months prior. And, you know, we got out of a bus and entered, armored UN vehicles as we were moving through the south, through Rafah. I was in shock at the level of destruction. Complete destruction of residential buildings, infrastructure, sewage flowing. I was I felt like I’d been transported into this zombie movie. Drove through Khan Younis just north of there. That’s much worse than Rafah. And then finally made it to Deir al-Balah, which is a central Gaza where our field hospital is. The first thing I did when I got to the field hospital is I went looking for, you know, my colleagues on the ground that I’d left behind and could barely recognize them because they had lost so much weight, literally skin on bones. The one constant was their, you know, their smiles. They were happy to see me again.
And I saw a seven year old, Enes, who had taken care of during my first mission, and he kind of hobbled over on his crutches and said, I’m so happy to see you. I have been waiting. I’d been asking when you’re coming back, and then asked me what gift I got him, and unfortunately, I couldn’t bring him any gifts because, one of the limitations of crossing through Karem Abu Salem is that they’re Israelis would limit us to a small backpack and one one luggage. And you can only take in your personal items to the point where if you had two bottles of Tylenol, they required you to throw one away. And it’s really sad. I mean, like I, a lot of coworkers had asked me like, can you bring in this very important medicine for my mom or, you know, my grandparent or my kid? And I said, I can’t, you know, because I basically I risk me being denied entry, which several doctors had been turned away in the subsequent weeks.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: What did you spend, would you say, most of your time doing on the ground in Gaza during your second, mission? Like, what could you do to help even if it was different from last time?
Dr. Mohammad Subeh: So the second mission was a bit different than the first mission, in that we wanted to be able to move and serve the population, as the population was also herded from one part of the Gaza Strip to the next, my primary goal was to go in and establish processes that we could replicate as we built other field hospitals, and to make sure that we had adequate quality control measures in place. Although, you know, you think you’re working at a field hospital, who cares about quality control. But it is very important. For example, if you put in a chest tube without adequate sterilization, well, then that patient in a few days is going to develop pus pockets in their chest. And then in the evenings going in and working clinically.
Now when mass casualty incidents would happen, what if we would get a surge of patients from a military strike? Everybody drops what they’re doing, mobilizes and addresses, you know, the need on the ground at that time. We were still I mean, I still heard drones above. The closest missile strike to me was during this mission. It was about a, you know, block away. And I felt it to my core. I felt I’ve never experienced a missile strike that close.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Were you surprised by all that seemed to have changed in such a short period of time since your last visit?
Dr. Mohammad Subeh: Yeah, absolutely. I did not think things, could be any worse when I left. And especially, you know, when I left, there was a lot of talk of, like, the red line being Rafah.
Day in and day out, we’d get, civilians who have been targeted by drones by, you know, via gunshot wounds or missile strikes penetrating their hearts and their lungs, severe burns. That was still happening. Exponentially worse. The malnutrition, essentially forced malnutrition, and infectious disease that we’re seeing. The living conditions have been so poor. And you imagine these are people have been displaced not once, not twice, not three times, a lot more than that. So if you’re malnourished, your immune system goes down. You’re more prone to illnesses, infections, respiratory infections, GI infections, skin disease everywhere. I can’t treat the simplest things. You know, scabies is everywhere. You know, people enter their tents, go to sleep, and then a scorpion, stings them and, snakes bite them. We don’t have antivenom. It was extremely, extremely difficult for me. I think witnessing that and you could feel this tense, palpable desperation as soon as you set foot cameras are now.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: I mean, you’re talking about how difficult it’s been to even just do your job. Treat patients on a very basic level. Do you have any stories of folks that you actually were able to help and in moments of joy and, I don’t know, a sigh of relief in any way. Throughout your second mission there.
Dr. Mohammad Subeh: One of the things that was one of the highlights of my trip this time was I was given the honor and privilege of administering the board examinations for the emergency medicine resident physicians in Gaza. And it was amazing because, you know, you don’t imagine administering a board exam while missiles are showering down around you and to be able to administer the exams and to see the investment of the resident physicians, I was examining their conviction and determination to be the best doctors they can be. And they’ve really gained a lot of experience in the last ten months. I mean, the things they’ve seen and done and the amount of stabilization of patients, which is kind of at our core as E.R. doctors, is not any experience any other E.R. resident will ever get in their lifetimes.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Right. And that there are still, folks who are willing to put their lives on the line to do this kind of work under these conditions. I mean, it seems almost like, you know, a silly little administrative thing for them to do a test when they’ve been doing the work already in the past couple of months.
Dr. Mohammad Subeh: But it’s something so important to them that, you know, this board certification is so important that, hey, you know, I I’ve earned this and they’ve earned. I mean, I would say earned it multiple times over. It reminded me that after the dust settles, they’re going to rebuild and they’re going to have amazing personnel on the ground to rebuild better than what they had over the past two decades under the blockade.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: I know another positive that has come out of your trips to Gaza is that you’ve been able to actually help some patients of yours come to the U.S. and get medical help here. Can you tell us a little bit about that and how you were able to make that happen?
Dr. Mohammad Subeh: There are thousands of children waiting for medical evacuation, for higher level of care and for definitive treatment, whether they are missing a limb, have sustained severe burns, are battling cancer. So when I returned, I started looking for ways to get some of these children over here for a higher level of care. At minimum, get them out of Gaza. One of those children is 15 year old Ahmed, who came to me actually on the third day of my first medical mission after a missile struck while he was gardening with his friends, killed off his friends. He came in with mangled legs, hemorrhaging, in shock, on the verge of death. I didn’t know if he was going to make it, because with the level of injuries that he sustained from that missile strike, most people wouldn’t survive it. And we took him to the operating room and had to amputate both of his legs up to the pelvis and his left hand half of his left hand. So he only had two remaining fingers. Fast forward three weeks. His mom ran up to me in the E.R. tent and pulled me out and said, I want you to see something. And I walked out and I saw this beat up car in front of the E.R. tent, and she opened the back door, and I saw his beautiful smile as he was sitting in the backseat of being discharged from the hospital. And as I held him and I hugged him and said how happy I was to see him miraculously leave the hospital. I promised him I do everything within my capacity to try to get him out of reserve for a higher level of care, and to match him with hopefully a facility here that would be able to take care of him. And a week ago we were able to greet Ahmed here in San Francisco airport. Him and his mom. And he’s being currently, outfitted with prosthetics so that he can walk again. And it was just amazing to kind of full circle, see him with his beautiful smile and see that we can hopefully kind of move the needle for him in terms of giving him a better life.
Dr. Mohammad Subeh: I was, you know, telling my wife after the second mission, I felt a lot more frustration and disappointment and anger than I felt on my first mission. And this is the stark contrast when I, you know, left what looked like a zombie movie setting. And I really saw the zombies outside of Gaza, dopamine zombies everywhere. Like we are conditioned to not care about our fellow human beings, despite us having the same life experiences in general. Like we all. As an ER doctor, I see people like you experience a heart attack. It doesn’t matter how much you have in the bank account, you’re going to experience a heart attack the same way, or a stroke, or, you know, a diagnosis of cancer or the loss of a loved one, or the birth of, you know, your first child, you experience it the same. So it was it was very difficult for me this time around to like, absorb what I was seeing, like to be transported on to a different planet and, and to realize, hey, this is how the rest of the world is. That’s a reason why this genocide is continued on for so long because of our complacency, because we’re caught up in kind of the our day to day. And just thinking about me, myself and I, we’ve allowed this to continue.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: I know you have kids of your own. How do you talk to them about what you’ve witnessed? And and I mean, how is it coming home to them, to your own kids?
Dr. Mohammad Subeh: We’ve been very deliberate in sharing information with both boys and having conversations and talking about how does that make you feel, and what are your thoughts about that? And then also, what power do you have as a seven year old and a 14 year old to make a change? You know, and it could be as simple as, you know, having a conversation with your friends or going out to a protest or calling a congressperson.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: And are they pretty active?
Dr. Mohammad Subeh: Very much so. You know, I remember in the second week of October, my 14 year old Ahmed, he came home one day really bothered. And he said, you know, some parents told me that I should stop talking about Palestine if I cared about my future. And he said, why? Why would I? Why can’t I? Like I’m trying to fight against the oppression that the Palestinians are facing. And so he kind of held his, you know, stood his ground. And, you know, I was happy to see that that’s that’s something that I think is the most important value that I can instill in my children is that you don’t fear for how this is going to affect your future, as long as you’re speaking the truth and fighting for what’s right, that’s what matters as a human being.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: I have to ask Doctor Subeh, are you planning to go back to Gaza again for a third time?
Dr. Mohammad Subeh: Yeah, I’m working on returning next month. Hopefully I’m allowed in and hopefully it doesn’t take as long to to get in. I if I can share this, one of the things that I found is so important to what we do as humanitarians there on the ground, especially for me as a as a doctor, is being there for emotional support for a lot of the patients. And so one of the patients I had this time around. His name is Yousef, 16 year old, who sustained traumatic injuries from a missile strike in the sirat. And when I came to him, I was walking through the ICU tent one day and I saw kind of a sad I mean, he was just sitting there in his bed, sad, with the beeping of the cardiac monitors, seeing his limb lost, his left leg tubes coming out of his chest and his belly. And I stopped to talk to him. And, I felt like I couldn’t really get him to feel any sense of hope. And I found out then from my coworkers that his whole family had been killed, and he didn’t know about it yet. One of the things that I had to do during my time there is to sit with Yousef and disclose to him that his parents, his brother, his sister were killed and he would no longer see them again.
Dr. Mohammad Subeh: And to bear witness to that anguish and sadness and grief that he experienced and continues to experience was something I think everybody should know about that this is this is happening every day. For us to tell a child that they will no longer have parents. That they can no longer play with their siblings is something that has huge impacts on on this generation. At the same time, like being able to visit him on a daily basis and to try to offer him whatever element of hope or consoling something I think is more important than me trying to stop the bleeding of a patient that rolls into the air. A lot of what we’re doing is not only the physical healing of the patient, but the mental and psychological healing that’s going to take decades, probably to overcome.
