Seven months of brutal Israeli genocide in Gaza have obliterated the local healthcare system, as the IDF has repeatedly targeted and destroyed hospitals and clinics in its military operations. When healthcare infrastructure was still standing, Gaza’s healthcare workers faced the challenge of treating grave injuries requiring specialist to get around this issue, surgeons around the world have remotely their colleagues in Gaza, using messaging services like Whatsapp to lend their expertise in the treatment of particularly severe injuries. Surgeons Osaid Alser and Simon Fitzgerald join The Marc Steiner Show to discuss their experience offering this remote support to their colleagues at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis—where shortly after this recording, mass graves containing hundreds of bodies of Palestinians executed by the IDF were found.
Studio Production: Cameron Granadino
Post-Production: Alina Nehlich
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Marc Steiner:
Welcome to the Marc Steiner Show here on the Real News. It’s good to have you all with us. And we continue our coverage of the war in Gaza and our series Not In Our Name. It’s especially relevant now to me in this week as we celebrate Passover. Our Passovers bring our families together, our friends together. And for our family, it’s not just to read the story of Moses, but to reflect on the notion of liberation, to talk about the ongoing slaughter and the war of destruction in Gaza as Jews saying, “No, not in our name.”
And we use this Passover to fight for the lives of those in Gaza and to end this horrendous war. And today, we talk with two physicians, Dr. Simon Fitzgerald and Dr. Osaid Alser. Simon Fitzgerald is a trauma surgeon at King’s County Hospital, an academic appointment at SUNY in Brooklyn. He’s also co-host of the radio show Trauma Code on WBAI.
And Dr. Osaid Alser is a Palestinian from Gaza training in general surgery in Texas. He’s also a clinical researcher with an interest in global surgery, surgical capacity assessment and capacity building in war-torn areas in low to middle-income countries. You’ll hear us talk about the Israeli attacks on hospitals in Gaza, the absolute devastating carnage that killed wounded patients, civilians, and medical personnel defying international law.
The day after we recorded, as reported in The Guardian, Ravina Shamdasani spokesperson for the UN high Commissioner for Human Rights, said 310 bodies were found on Nasser hospital grounds buried in waste, some bound, some naked, women and the wounded among them. Then another 35 were found. Who knows how many more will be found on the grounds of Nasser or Al-Shifa hospitals or any of the devastated, destroyed hospitals in Gaza?
Now, Israel denies these stories, saying it’s all, “Baseless and unfounded.” What’s occurring now is a violation of international and humanitarian law. As this story unfolds, we’ll bring you more in-depth coverage from Gaza, from Palestine, from Israel, from those who live and experience it and the activists working to find a way to the future. And gentlemen, welcome. Good to have you both with us.
Simon Fitzgerald:
Thanks for having me.
Osaid Alser:
Thank you for having me too.
Marc Steiner:
Let me just take a step back for a moment to begin to explain to people listening to us now what this idea of global surgery is and just what the two of you did to assist surgeons in Gaza while here in the United States. Whoever wants to start. Doctor Alser, why don’t you begin?
Osaid Alser:
Global surgery is a field that really flourished and started as a separate concept in 2015 when The Lancet, which is one of the most popular medical journals, in collaboration with the WHO, created the Lancet Commission on Global Surgery. And this is basically a way to enhance surgical capacity and surgical care in terms of safety and delivery, especially in low-to-middle income countries.
I’m interested in global surgery, and that came from me being a Palestinian, first as a medical student, then as a physician, to basically help out my country. When this genocide started in Gaza back in October, we really tried, especially being from Gaza and being away in the US, tried to help out as much as I can. And then, in late January, early February, we had a webinar where we had my cousin actually Dr. Khaled Alser, who’s a general surgeon at Nasser Hospital, and we can talk about that later, who’s now abducted unfortunately by the Israeli army, basically because he was the only general surgeon at that time, he wanted help.
He created just assembled a WhatsApp group, started with just a few people from his followers on Instagram. And then, so I joined him and we recruited surgeons from across the world. And not just surgeons, intensivists, like other specialties as well. But really, the focus was to help out in managing patients with traumatic injuries. When we started that group, the aim was to help him when he is facing really tough, challenging, traumatic cases that even trauma surgeons in the US struggle dealing with those.
We discuss a few cases really like neurosurgery cases where Khaled is not trained in neurosurgery, but he managed to operate on those patients fixing a head bleed and opening a skull to evacuate the bleed, just from a few hands and short videos that were sent from trauma surgeons and neurosurgeons from other countries. So really, the process was to create a source for him to manage those traumatic injuries.
Marc Steiner:
Simon, let me bring you into this. Reading the article the two of you wrote for The Guardian, for folks reading, two things, I think, would strike them a, almost unfathomable to think that surgeons from 3,000, 5,000 miles away, 3,000 miles away can actually work with a surgeon alone who’s never done this surgery before to save lives at a hospital in Gaza. It’s mind-numbing, in some ways, to think about that.
Simon Fitzgerald:
Well if I can, thanks first of all, Marc, for having us. And also thank you, Osaid. I know I’m a guest, but I’m a Baltimore guy on the radio with Marc Steiner and you did this after I asked you, so thank you. I feel like a co-host almost.
Marc Steiner:
Good. Go right ahead. Please be.
Simon Fitzgerald:
Having you on the radio. And I just wanted to … This may be the first time I’m on real news, so thank you also, Marc, I really appreciate your platform, but also your history. You have a voice that’s represented Baltimore for a long time and resonates in a certain way. And I just want to introduce myself real quick. I’m a Baltimore guy, graduate from Baltimore Polytechnic Institute. I have surgical training in New York and surgical critical care training from Hopkins.
And my involvement in any meaningful way with medical care in Gaza and the Palestinian medical institutions and movement is all through Osaid. And I think, to his credit, Osaid, even as a trainee in Texas, has really been a leader in expanding capacity in the face of really genocidal violence. And Osaid said that, and I’m definitely going to co-sign that, and I’ve spoken for hours at a time on why I think that’s appropriate from the medical and legal history.
But the point is that I think our work together, I think, has been very meaningful and I think it’s really an honor to be on the air with you. And Marc, I want you to take back over, but as we record this, we’re just days after a mass grave being uncovered in Nasser Hospital, which is the hospital where our collaboration took place in January and February, when Osaid’s cousin Khaled, the only surgeon left there, a literally decimated medical institution at that time. There used to be 10 surgeons plus trainees, now there’s just one.
And I think it’s telling at this moment, particularly since Khaled, the subject of that article that you mentioned in The Guardian and also co-author on an article we haven’t talked about yet that we submitted to The Lancet and is under consideration, is incommunicado, essentially disappeared the way a South American dictatorship would do to a physician they felt was a political threat. I really want to thank you for having us on the air and this is a very important topic in this very important moment.
Marc Steiner:
Well, thanks for that. And this is important, I guess. It is extremely important. And when I read the article and then heard from others about what was going on in Gaza at the hospitals, and when you detail in your article about the surgery that Dr. Khaled Alser had to do alone with help from you all thousands of miles away, from abdominal explorations of a three-year-old child who was hit by the Israeli bombs, and a nine-year-old child who needed amputation of a leg, and just all the stories in there, to me, it’s almost unfathomable to understand how a single surgeon in a Gazan hospital with the help of surgeons as yourselves to get through all this.
In the midst of a war where thousands of Gazans are being killed, many of them women and children and most of them non-combatants, no matter who they are. And I’m a son of a surgeon, so it’s almost unfathomable to me to think about how that could be.
Simon Fitzgerald:
If I could respond to that briefly, and I’d like to hear what Osaid says about it, but what really troubles me about what we saw working in support of the surgeons at Nasser Hospital at Khan Yunis, what really bothered me that was, at the time, one of the most well-equipped and capacitated hospitals in the midst of the genocidal violence, and it is basically no longer functional.
And that’s in the second-largest city in Gaza. And we really don’t know of any institution or group that can provide adequate medical care to the capital Gaza City, in addition to people who are providing aid including International World Central Kitchen can just be murdered systematically with armed drones and artificial intelligence. What we don’t know, what we haven’t seen, what we can’t treat is really what bothers me more. I don’t know. Osaid, do you want to add anything to that?
Osaid Alser:
No, absolutely. It’s sad because for me, when I was a medical student, I trained in that hospital. I trained at Al-Shifa hospital as well. So to me, that was my second home. My home actually was destroyed and my second home was destroyed as well. So really, I lost pretty much everything in Gaza, like memories. And my medical school was destroyed as well, the other medical school was destroyed. So the entire healthcare system is pretty much destroyed.
The remaining healthcare units are basically just ruins of previously functioning hospital, or I want to say correct myself, partially functioning hospitals. Because let’s not forget even before this started, the healthcare system is pretty much collapsed from before. Healthcare workers, at baseline, they don’t receive salaries. Sometimes they receive just a couple of hundreds from random donations.
The supplies at baseline, everything is lacking, like even normal saline, just the fluid that we normally use on the daily basis. Cancer care, surgical instruments, even access to outside facility. The way, for example, we do it in the US, if a hospital is struggling and you want to refer a patient, you can easily call that hospital and you transfer the patient. But in Gaza, you want to transfer a patient, then you have to go through Egypt or Israel or other countries and it’s super hard.
My late dad who passed away from other reasons, his permit was denied. My aunt who had early stage uterine cancer, she was denied a referral and she died from metastasis spreading cancer to her body. And this time, Nasser hospital, it was pretty functioning hospital before. If you want to get major surgery, even Whipple surgery, which is a major surgery where you restrict part of the pancreas when you have cancer there, you get it there because there are really good surgeons there with the lack of instruments and all of that.
And then, all the senior surgeons had to leave, and some junior surgeons who basically live nearby. Nasser hospital, it was pretty functioning hospital. You’d get major surgery in it before. You’d get pretty much standard of care. But right now, I mean it’s no longer functioning. And it was intentionally man-made destruction of the hospital.
If we go back three months ago, initially Nasser Hospital was attacked, was invaded by the Israeli military. Patients, doctors were either killed or abducted or displaced. And Khaled, he was one of them. He was abducted for a brief period of time and then they released him about 24 hours later. After they basically destroyed most of the hospitals and displaced the staff, it was for brief period of time, for a few days, non-functional.
Then the surgeons, some of the surgeons including Khaled, came back to the hospital. They tried to basically make it more functional so that they receive and treat patients. But then, because of that, they punished him and they abducted him. They killed staff, patients. And as Simon said, it’s so horrible. I can’t imagine it, as a Palestinian from Gaza seeing patients with fully catheter, like urinary catheter and casts and bandages around them?
And this is just from today, they were extracted from under the … They were buried like in a mass grave inside the hospital. This is horrendous. I have no words to say. I don’t know. This is just beyond words. And I don’t want to get too emotional, but it’s just what happened at Nasser Hospital, previously at Al-Shifa Hospital is just so wrong. And we should all, as a medical community, even non-medical community, we should all oppose that because this is just against humanity.
Marc Steiner:
The stories that both of you wrote about in the article, picking up on what you just said, Osaid, horrendous, the kind of traumatic injuries, the deaths taking place in the hospitals themselves, it’s almost unfathomable. The question is: here the two of you are doing everything you can to, or did when you could, work with your cousin, the surgeon, to do surgeries he’s never done before to try to save people’s lives.
I’ve covered people who were in the midst of the war in Bosnia and other places, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard stories like this of hospitals being attacked and destroyed, of a single surgeon with the help of surgeons thousands of miles away, helping him to do surgeries to save people’s lives.
Simon Fitzgerald:
If I could, Marc, I think part of what’s going on in this moment has to do with the access to phones and videos and the ability to document it. And also, that technology allowed us to collaborate. And also the technology of the killing fields in Gaza is also something that’s really part of that same Black Mirror episode of what’s going on. But one thing that I wanted to say earlier about Osaid, Dr. Alser, one reason why a trainee in Texas is the leader right now on this kind of collaboration is the complete absence of our leadership of hospitals, of medical institutions, organizations.
The committee of interns and residents, the labor union for residents, called for a ceasefire relatively early to their credit. The Israeli, what’s it called, Physicians for Human Rights, has been at the forefront calling for habeas corpus, return of physicians who have been taken prisoner, abducted, disappeared, until we can speak to them or they can speak for themselves. I don’t know what to call it.
And there have been reports also since we’re talking about physicians, of Israeli physicians that have been staffing the detainee centers talking about just routine hand amputations because of extreme abuse and neglect in handcuffing prisoners. And I consider, our collaboration with Khaled hasn’t ended until he comes back here and tells me, “No thanks, I don’t need your help anymore,” we demand that he be presented and returned and allowed to treat his patients and allow us to talk to him and to continue the work that we described in The Guardian and we’re hopefully going to have published in a medical journal like The Lancet, and that work continues.
Osaid Alser:
And if I may add?
Marc Steiner:
Go ahead, Osaid.
Osaid Alser:
If that’s okay with Marc. Khaled is just a representation of many healthcare workers, including doctors and nurses and paramedics who have been abducted and still abducted. The exact number, we don’t have an exact number, but at least from just our network on the ground, at least there’s still hundreds healthcare workers who are still abducted for no reason.
I guess the only reason, because they stayed in those hospitals despite asking them to leave, which is essentially abandoning their patients. They’re really doing their job and more than their job. And then, not just abduction, but killing as well. Right now, the number is around 500 of healthcare workers who were killed. Most of them were on duty. And we’re not just talking about consultants and chairs of departments and super, super important to mention, but also medical students, also junior doctors who decided to just stay and work. They were not asked to, but they really just volunteered to stay and help out because otherwise the hospital would completely collapse without them.
And then displacement. There’s a lot of doctors, healthcare workers, really, it’s a really tough decision. My mom, my dad, they had to go south to Rafah. And then, do I just stay in north and worry about my families? Some of them decide just go south. And some of them, they are now at a European hospital, although they’re not from the south, they’re from north. It’s just a lot of dehumanization of those healthcare workers who are basically healthcare workers. They’re just trying to do their job. I just wanted to add that just to make sure we are not forgetting the many, many healthcare workers who have been subjected to the brutal treatment.
Marc Steiner:
What do the two of you do now? And other men and women like you at this moment? Given the reality on the ground, the tens of thousands who have been killed, in the hospitals that have been decimated, the doctors, nurses, staff, killed, arrested, hospitals being torn apart, blown apart. A, where does this struggle go now? But what happens to you, to physicians like you, who are in the midst of this struggle but thousands of miles away? What do you do next?
Simon Fitzgerald:
Well, Osaid, I’d like you to answer because you just told me about some of your plans and I’ve been getting some surgeons to help you. Do you want to talk about the curriculum you’re setting up-
Osaid Alser:
Of course.
Simon Fitzgerald:
… for students whose hospitals and medical schools have been destroyed?
Marc Steiner:
Sure, please do. Yes.
Osaid Alser:
Yes. That’s one of the projects that we’ve been working on for a while. I work with an organization called OxPal, which stands for Oxford Palestine, and it’s a collaboration between Oxford University and medical students and the doctors in Gaza. And that was established many years ago. Because of the needs for trauma training and the difficulty of going there and training surgeons, especially with the permits and all of that, so we decided to create an entire curriculum to teach trauma surgery.
And when we say trauma surgery, that includes how to manage gunshots and blast injuries and how to stop the bleed and all of that. We designed a curriculum for both medical students and doctors and it’s specifically to simplify trauma surgery for them, especially those who don’t have trauma experience. And just so that you know, in Gaza baseline, there is no trauma surgeons. Zero. There’s zero trauma surgeons in Gaza that are baseline. And now, there is only general surgeon who have experienced in trauma surgeons, but none who’s fellowship trained like Dr. Fitzgerald.
Marc Steiner:
Not because they had been arrested, been killed. Why are there none?
Osaid Alser:
From before. None because, basically, as I said, the healthcare system is pretty much collapsed from before, because of the occupation preventing surgeons from traveling and getting a fellowship and going back to help out. Or some people like myself, which I blame myself for being part of the brain drain, leaving and not going back to Gaza. Gaza lacks a lot of specialty and specialized surgeons.
Simon Fitzgerald:
Well, I was just going to say if Osaid wouldn’t mind, in working with Osaid, I’ve studied quite a bit and he’s been a leader in capacity assessment and building for years related to healthcare in Gaza and the West Bank. But I’ve come to understand that, for years early on, there was some Israeli investment in the hospitals in Gaza, but mostly, people traveled to Israel from Gaza to get complex treatment, even dialysis.
But sometime in the mid-2000s with the rise politically of Hamas and the tightening of the Israeli military encirclement of Gaza, all that was cut off. The dialysis patients died, cancer patients died. Since then, there’s been really a heroic, a really admirable investment in homegrown development of specialty care and basically standard of care at hospitals in Gaza. And I think that’s one reason why the Israeli military has been so intent on destroying them as an institution.
But for example, one thing that even continues to this day and continues to be frustrating, Osaid mentioned stop the bleed. And for surgeons like us, especially trauma surgeons, that means something in particular. That’s an organized campaign largely done out of American College of Surgeons Committee on Trauma to expand the capacity to stop bleeding in the field for people who’ve been shot, hit by a car, major bleed, holding pressure, tourniquets and things, for witnesses in addition to first responders. We can’t even get tourniquets to Gaza. They’ve been banned from import probably for a decade.
Marc Steiner:
Wait, tourniquets have been banned?
Simon Fitzgerald:
Yeah, as a medical, they’re not allowed to be imported. That’s not on the list of allowed things that can cross the checkpoints. So they’ve been home produced in Gaza for years. But even now, surgeons who are going to European Gaza hospital, trauma surgeons who are asking American College of Surgeons, “Hey, can I get a box of tourniquets because we need them?” Are basically told no. That’s not something that ACS wants to support.
Our leadership has been really absent, and I think it’s been a little bit heartbreaking for me and probably more so for Osaid. But I think that’s the other thing that surgeons can do right now is just hold ourselves accountable, be honest, and try to extend some solidarity to our colleagues and the standard of care to people in Gaza and elsewhere in the world.
Osaid Alser:
And therefore, if you allow me, Marc, to go back to my point, because of the lack of support from many, many organizations, leadership and all of that, so me as Palestinian and other colleagues from the US and the UK, we’re planning on developing a whole curriculum. It will be online. Unfortunately, the big problem will be the connectivity is still a problem, but it will be recorded for people who are able to join later, to basically teach how to do the resuscitation part, how to manage a bleed, how to explore an injury in the abdomen, in the chest, and vascular trauma, pediatric trauma and neurosurgeon trauma like head, spine, all of that.
It’s a full curriculum similar to ACS teaching as well, similar to the teaching that I receive here in Texas. And with the help of many surgeons including Dr. Fitzgerald and other trauma surgeons, we’re hoping to at least do something. It’s definitely not enough. It’s not like teaching it in person. It’s not like the American College or Royal College of Surgeons bringing a surgeon from Gaza to train them and then sending them back or send sending missions, like surgeons to go there and help. But really, no matter what we do, still there is a lot of things we have to do. And we still need to do a lot of work to rebuild the trauma system in Gaza.
Marc Steiner:
I know you both are short on time. I’d like to know, I’m curious about your thoughts on where you think this goes from here, both as physicians and surgeons, and what can be done and what kind of support can be given. And B, in the human political question of where this takes us. Just to be very frank that for me, watching this as a man who grew up when I was a child with people with numbers on their arms in my living room, with stories of what happened to my family in the pogroms and the Holocaust, watching this happen and that it’s people who come from the same world that I do who are carrying this out is painful and just insanity. And that’s part of how I approach this at the moment.
Simon Fitzgerald:
If I may, Osaid and Marc, I have a little bit of a similar background. I’m from a Baltimore family that’s half Ashkenazi as well as half Irish.
Marc Steiner:
We have similar backgrounds all the way around then.
Simon Fitzgerald:
What I’ve been thinking about, what’s been resonating with me is the concept and the historical example of Dachau. And I don’t want to overstate any connections to the Nazis or whatever, but Dachau was a concentration camp, a death camp, unlike many of them at that time was within Germany, where most of them were farther away were in places like Poland where the local population was being exterminated as well.
And the Americans who liberated Dachau write about being so shocked by piles of emaciated bodies in ovens and really horrific things that they brought in the local population to clean it up, just to make them look it in the eye and take ownership over it. And I keep thinking about, if and when … We can’t bomb Gaza forever, I don’t think. At some point, they’re going to have to stop and clean up the bodies. And that being at the same time that we’re sending munitions over from the United States, at the same time that there’s no solidarity from American physicians and a lot of world physicians, Israeli physicians have really cosigned the destruction of the healthcare system in Gaza.
And people in Baltimore and The Baltimore Sun that was just paid propaganda celebrating the destruction of hospitals by name in Gaza. This is, I think, all of our Dachau moment. We’re going to have to look at this and come to terms with what it means about us that we’re a part of this.
Marc Steiner:
I absolutely agree.
Osaid Alser:
And if I may add, the irony is that me as Palestinian from Gaza working in the US getting salary, paying my tax money, it goes to kill my people, to destroy my own home. So far, I lost about 10 cousins, immediate and distant cousins, from my own family. So can you imagine how difficult that is to just think about? My money goes to kill my people.
Marc Steiner:
No, yes. I have spoken with friends who have family in Gaza, Palestinian friends here in Baltimore who I’m very close to, and there have been deaths. One of my closest friends’ nephew was shot and killed on the West Bank by a settler in the midst of all this. The real question is, how do we stand up, US surgeons and people who are deeply involved in this, and we as people to stop our country in the United States from bankrolling this genocide and to really working to end this war? It’s unfathomable to me that this is just going on in front of our eyes and nobody’s doing anything to stop it.
Simon Fitzgerald:
Yeah, what can you do? I think that’s, for me, why it’s important to do this work and listen to people like Osaid and Khaled who are taking the leadership on this. And I think having those human relationships, listening and thinking about a shared future are valuable right now. And I think just being principled, studying what’s going on, understanding why this is a genocide, and having the moral courage and clarity to stand against genocide.
That doesn’t mean we can’t identify when there’s genocidal violence in Sudan and stand against that as well and name the villains in that conflict. We have to call our political leadership in any form we have to stop arming genocidal violence. Even if it’s unsuccessful, just be clear about it.
And for the two of you who have done this work from a distance, advising on how to these surgeries, this must be A, taking a toll on you as well, because A, you can’t do it anymore, the communications are down, you don’t really know what’s going on. And B, just the human toll of being … the stress of having to do that work at a distance and knowing what’s happening on the ground in Gaza. Osaid, do you want to start?
Osaid Alser:
Yeah, and I just wanted to add a brief message, not necessarily for the medical community. It’s a message for the general population in America. I think the biggest thing, if you want to help out and just be a human and try to just feel what’s going on there, I think the biggest thing is just reading about what’s going on, understanding what’s going on, rather than just pretending to be, oh, there is just a conflict in the Middle East.
It bothers me a lot when I hear this term, “A conflict in the Middle East.” That’s just a very ignorant term that people who just don’t want to listen, don’t want to read about it. Educating ourselves, reading about it, listening to both sides, and then you have your own perspective. I think it’s super, super important. And once you understand it, then I’m sure everybody can help.
The biggest thing for me, I had a lot of friends from the US and from the UK and all of that, they’ve never been to Palestine. They just hear from the news, from the mainstream media, BBC, CNN, etc. And then, once they went there and visited, they visited both Palestine and Israel. And I’m not talking about Gaza, I’m talking about West Bank for example. And they went there, saw the checkpoints, saw the humiliation, saw the true meaning of apartheid in the West Bank, how being Palestinian Muslim, you cross in this side, being a Palestinian Christian, you cross on that side, being an American Western, you cross on that side. Being Jewish Israeli, you cross from that side.
And seeing that, seriously when I saw them, the amount of real honest posts on social media after they went back, I was like, “I can’t write that, honestly.” Because I’ll be detained if I fly from one country to another. People are genuine for the most part, they mean it. But they really need to understand and really need to read, and then they will have a different perspective. Unfortunately, unlike this kind of show, the majority of the mainstream media, they’re still spreading the propaganda, spreading the lies and false information, misinformation about what’s going on and trying to just show it’s a Hamas versus Israel war.
It’s not. This is just a Palestinians in general. They’re fed up with the settler occupation that has been going on since even before 1948. And things in Palestine did not start on October 7th. If your knowledge about Palestine starts after October 7th, then you’re ignorant and you haven’t read enough about it. Just go read, understand what’s going on, and then share stuff directly, help out, ask the people on the ground, see how they can get help and take it from there.
Marc Steiner:
Were you about to say something, Simon?
Simon Fitzgerald:
Well, just one more thing I wanted to … Maybe we’re getting towards the end. And I’m very careful not to overstate things, but I think the amount of violence that … I just want to think about it just another second, that physicians as well as people in general and Gaza have suffered, what occurred to me, and I’ve talked about how it felt like our participation in this telemedicine effort was like a Black Mirror episode.
As the surgical nurse on the other end of it was shot in the chest and there were explosions in the hospital, and we’re watching or listening to audio and video of these things, it switched from telemedicine and forensic anthropology. But as more has come out, I think, about the use of artificial intelligence and the more we understand the purposeful targeting of leaders, including medical leaders, it occurred to me that, it’s come out, it’s been reported in Israeli press, at least that WhatsApp and other groups were being exploited to figure out connections, presumably to Hamas.
But a lot of doctors were murdered. Was that why? Somehow, if Khaled, they thought was Hamas and we’re on this WhatsApp group with him, if we were in Gaza, our lives would have been in danger. And not just in the general sense of being in a war zone, but of being targeted by armed drones and things like that. I think that’s really been eye-opening for me. And I think the only thing we can do is ask and demand that this stop and stop arming and funding that kind of violence.
Marc Steiner:
Well, I want to thank both of you for the article that you put out, and also for this work you’ve done, have attempted to do over these months of trying to help the lone surgeon treat and help the people in the hospital in Gaza. It’s heroic work and the fact that you can no longer do it because the communications are down, it is just utterly painful.
Simon Fitzgerald:
And our partners are literally held incommunicado.
Marc Steiner:
In prisons, in jails, wherever they are.
Simon Fitzgerald:
What do we know? We don’t know.
Osaid Alser:
Exactly. I think what we think where he is at, I think he’s detained or abducted. But we don’t know for sure if he’s there. We don’t know 100% he’s there. We don’t know if he was killed and buried under the rubble of Nasser Hospital. We don’t know that for sure.
Simon Fitzgerald:
And what I’m reminded in this moment, I have a good friend in Brooklyn who was an artist from Columbia and lived in … Not Columbia, I’m sorry, in Guatemala, and lived in Guatemala during the Civil War. And as a student troublemaker, he would put up graffiti, “Vivos Los Llevaron, Vivos los Queremos.” “They took them alive, we want them alive.”
And I think that statement really applies to this moment, to our colleagues, physicians, surgeons, healthcare workers among others that are taken from Gaza. They should be presented and we should be allowed to understand what’s going on and get them back to their patients as quickly as possible.
Marc Steiner:
And I think for me, on this end, one of the most important things is we are taping this on the first day of Passover. And I want all the people in the Jewish world, in this country, people who are listening and who I will send this to, to hear with the words of these two physicians, Simon Fitzgerald and Osaid Alser, about what’s going on in Gaza and saying Not In Our Name. This has to end and we cannot allow this mass murder to take place. The destruction of hospitals and the entire world of Gaza is being blown apart.
I do really thank the two of you for the work you’ve done and that you continue to do. We just have to keep this in front of the American public’s consciousness to say it has to end and we have to insist on it ending. Thank you both so much for taking the time today. I know you’re very busy in your medical practices and very busy with the work as surgeons. And thank you so much for the work you’ve been doing for the people of Gaza.
Simon Fitzgerald:
Well, thank you, Marc, for having us on. And I’ve felt like a long time listener, first time caller this whole time, so I appreciate you sharing your platform with us.
Osaid Alser:
Thank you, Marc. And thank you, Simon, for the invite as well. I appreciate that.
Marc Steiner:
We’re all in this together.
Osaid Alser:
Thank you.
Simon Fitzgerald:
Solidarity forever.
Marc Steiner:
Once again, I want to thank Doctors Osaid Alser and Simon Fitzgerald for joining us today. And please take the time to read the attached article they wrote for The Guardian, and we’ll be linking to the other work as well, which is well worth the read. I want to thank Cameron Grandino for running the studio session today. The brilliant audio editor, Alina Nehlich, as the magician of sound. Rosette Sewali for bringing the article to my attention, 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. For the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner for the Marc Steiner Show and Not In Our name. Please let me know what you thought of what you heard today and what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at mss@therealnews.com and I’ll get right back to you. Thanks for listening and take care.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
