War on Medics: Global HealthCare Workers Unite

Join Dr. Omar Abdel Mannan, a pediatric neurologist and humanitarian, co-founder of Gaza Medic Voices and Healthcare Workers for Palestine, as he shares the untold stories of healthcare workers in Gaza. From the devastating conditions they face to the heroic efforts to save lives, Dr. Mannan sheds light on the urgent need for global attention and support. This powerful conversation highlights the importance of solidarity in the face of injustice, and the global movement of Healthcare Workers uniting for peace. 

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Transcript

Hello, everyone. I have Dr. Omar Abdel Mannan here with me today on Superhumanizer. Following the news on social media, a profile called Gaza Medic Voices appeared on my feed that showed a quote from a doctor. It said, the suffering that we're seeing can't be described or articulated. Gaza medic voices told their stories, medical students, doctors, and health care workers witnessing severely traumatizing cases, practicing medicine in horrific conditions, severely restricting their ability to help people and save lives, and even their own survival under constant threat.

I messaged the profile asking if someone would come on for an interview and Dr. Mannan replied, truly a precious gift and welcome surprise. He is a pediatric neurologist in the UK completing a PhD in pediatric multiple sclerosis. He is an Oxford University graduate and is currently practicing medicine and conducting research at the esteemed Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children.

He has over 25 peer reviewed publications in major medical journals like JAMA and Lancet. He's a humanitarian from the UK to Egypt and Palestine. He co founded a British Egyptian telemedicine startup, Dr. Fly. And is a founding member of OxPAL MedLink, an educational link between Oxford University teaching hospitals and medical schools in the West Bank and Gaza, and has himself taught clinical skills to medical students in Palestine.

Dr. Mannan, you really are in every definition a hero and in our word, the definition of a superhumanizer. So thank you so much for being here. 

Thank you so much, Hani, for having me. It's an honor to be here. And the heroes are in Gaza, 

truly. Yes. Agreed. And every, all of my guests say that. Thank you so much for your time.

 I know we're going to dive into a lot of stories today. Some hopeful, some sad. I like to start out with a little icebreaker game called what brings you joy. Would you play it with me? 

Of course. Happy to. 

What brings you joy Dr. Mannan?

My daughter, my seven year old daughter, Rania brings me the utmost joy.

Oh, beautiful. Do you have just one daughter? Just the one, 

but she's like two kids in one mashallah, 

a boy and a girl combined. aww, 

I love that. Beautiful. Thank you. What brings you joy? 

 Connecting with my friends, actually socializing with people I've met through this work through Gaza and have focused Palestine.

I've met people in the last eight weeks that I feel like I've known for 20 years. We've shared moments of sadness, we've cried together, but we've laughed together. We've cried from joy of seeing the number of people that have been coming to the vigils. So that brings me so much joy these days.

 Can't imagine how profound and important that is. And I'm really looking forward to you sharing that with our audience. Thank you. One more. What brings you joy?

Watching tennis and playing tennis, the passion of mine, I started at a very young age. I was brought up watching Pete Sampras and then loved watching Roger Federer.

And now just, yeah, whenever I get a chance, I'll pick up a tennis racket and just hit a few balls. And that just brings me happiness. 

Such an important stress relief exercise there too. Thank you for sharing that. Would you mind doing that for me? Of course. 

 Hani, what brings you joy?

Being here with you, Dr. Mannan, this really brings me joy. Although there's a lot of darkness that's happening right now, especially what you're amplifying just like you meeting you in this space, finding each other through this work has brought me a lot of joy in this darkness. 

That's very kind.

Thank you. What else brings you joy? 

Rain brings me joy. I live in the desert here and it doesn't rain very often, but it's been raining for the last two days and there's a lot of clouds. We don't usually have weather here, but it's really nice when we do. News. Yes, it is. I'm sure unlike in the UK.

You'll be at home here. I'm happy to swap with you. I'll come to California, you come to London. We can switch 

places, absolutely. I'll 

invite you there every week. Amazing, What brings you joy? 

Recently, we launched this podcast like two days ago and the idea started really shortly after October 7, because I just didn't know what I was going to do with myself. I really wanted to do something and I knew that I have a certain skillset and how I was going to apply that.

So we launched two days ago and although the content is humanizing, but it's also highlighting a lot of tragedy launching it, knowing that I did something with my grief and I'm still doing something that on some level also brings me joy. Thank you so much. Thank you so much.

 I love playing that game. I've learned so much about you in such a short time. let's learn more about you, Dr. Mannan. Tell us about you, where you're from and your background. 

So I'm a British Egyptian born to to Egyptian parents in Cairo in 1987, I grew up in the late 80s and early 90s in Egypt.

A very happy childhood till the age of eight. My father, who's a pediatrician, a children's doctor, decided to relocate to Scotland, Aberdeen, which is a big city in Scotland in 95 to basically pursue his career and improve our quality of life honestly speaking. And We relocated then and initially the plan was to stay for a few years, but 27 years later, we're still in the UK.

And yeah, I've moved around the UK quite a lot. I studied in Oxford, did six years of medical school there. Made amazing connections, friends that are still best friends to me to this day. And I've been working in the NHS, the National Health Service in the UK as a doctor, as a pediatrician, children's doctor since 2011.

I almost was at the end of my residency program, or we call it specialist training in the UK in pediatric neurology which is my subspecialty. And then before I finished, I decided to take time out to do a PhD, so to do a doctorate. Which in the UK, you have to do sort of full time outside of your medical training.

My research has been for the past three and a half, coming up to the fourth year in pediatric multiple sclerosis and neuroinflammation, which is something that I'm very passionate about and very interested in. And. Yeah that's where I am career wise, and I'm sure we'll touch on Gaza, Palestine has been very close to my heart since the late 2000s, when I got involved in work through medical school, actually, which was my route into Gaza.

 You are truly an honorary Palestinian although you are Egyptian, you've dedicated yourself so heartfully to the cause and to multiple sclerosis research, which is such an important field. You're a very well celebrated physician who's contributing much to the field.

So would you please tell us about what you've been doing in that space? Yeah, 

 Pediatric multiple sclerosis, people always are shocked when you tell them that kids get MS because people assume that only adults get MS the reality is the majority of patients who get MS are in their 20s and 30s and 40s, but there is a small proportion of people who get it before the age of 18.

So in my, in the hospital I work in, Greyhill Mystery Hospital, we look after probably 20 to 30 percent of the caseload of pediatric MS in the whole of the UK. And across London and Birmingham, there's three main hospitals that deal with 80 percent of the cases. When I say the cases, literally a hundred cases a year.

So it is very small numbers we are talking about. But the problem with MS in pediatrics is these kids have a very inflammatory disease. So they present often unwell. And despite that, they recover very quickly when you give them the right treatment. Pediatric MS and MS in general has had a paradigm shift in the last 10 to 15 years.

We went from having 2 or 3 drugs available 10 years ago to now having over 25 drugs and counting . Literally obliterated the relapses that people experience and made them live completely normal lives. So we have people within our community, patients who are marathon runners, who are playing football at a soccer at a national level.

We have people who have gone to Oxford and studied law. These kids are doing amazing things. So my own interests within the field has been. Looking at the imaging, looking at the MRI imaging that we need to use to follow the disease trajectory and look at treatment response to these medications.

And I'm particularly interested in what we call brain atrophy and brain volume. Any of us up until the age of 21, , our brains are growing year on year. When we reach 21, 22, depending on kind of person by person, our brain actually starts to shrink year on year, small amounts. In MS, it actually shrinks by a much larger percentage.

And that's because there is a neurodegenerative component of MS, which people forget about, which is what leads to people being in wheelchairs in their 50s and 60s. Or that's the image that we had, when we had no treatment. So I'm interested to look at the brain volume of these kids and what is happening in response to these amazing drugs that we have now, and whether these drugs are actually affecting that rate of change and that shrinkage of the brain.

So it's very niche, but it's, I think, an important part. And it's my interest, my expertise within the imaging field. And that's essentially what I'm working , on a, large cohorts of children with MS across three big centers in the U. K. 

Incredible. I knew you were going to blow our minds with what you were going to share and it's truly so admirable that you are contributing to this field.

And all these treatments watching these Children regain their life is so important and caring for Children in that way I think what connects us at a deeply, profoundly human level is caring for the Children thank you so much for what you're doing in that space. What has it been like for you as an Arab Egyptian doctor in general?

As an Arab Egyptian doctor in the UK I mean my identity, you're right, I see myself, I identify myself and I was asked this question earlier actually by a friend, like identify as a doctor first and foremost and humanitarian human being who cares about humanity and then if you delve deeper than yes, I'm Egyptian, I'm British, I'm Arab, I'm Muslim.

These are my key characteristics. I would say in the UK in general, growing up coming from Egypt, I was very much a fish out of water very early on. And that was just the difficulty of being in a foreign place where, people especially in some of the towns I lived in, it was primarily a very white British community.

So I was a bit of an outsider. I didn't suffer to be honest with you, I would say that actually the UK is a very tolerant place on the whole and did not really experience racism at large, there would be comments at school from, kids are kids and kids are often mean, so that sort of thing.

But overall, I would say. It has been a positive experience. And if anything, one thing that has really helped for me, in the hospital I work in the environment I work in, it is so multi ethnic and it's a melting pot of London, especially 60 percent of people in London in the UK are born outside of the UK.

So that's a large migrant or second generation migrant population. The fact that I can speak Arabic I can, talk to patients in Arabic, they sort of look at me and they think this is a ethnic doctor of ethnic minority like me. So that there is that connection that I form often with my South Asian and black and Arab patients essentially.

 That's something that comes as an advantage, not a disadvantage in any way, shape or form. 

And what about right now? 

Yeah, that's a great question. You can see I, I'm wearing my kuffiyeh and I wear it everywhere. I don't really hide . I also wear my band. Save Gaza, I am very open about it , I don't do it to upset or annoy anyone.

It's just, I feel it's part of my identity now as someone who cares about humanity. So largely the response has actually been amazing in the UK. , I've been stopped on the street by random people to shake hands with me to say, I heard you speak on this TV channel and what you said was exactly what we need to hear.

I can honestly say that the majority of the response has been positive. Now, intermixed with that, there is pockets of hatred, the pockets of vitriol, and that comes as soon as you start putting your head above the parapet and you start talking and you start making some sort of headway in terms of addressing the reality, which is the injustice of the occupation of Palestine for the last 75 years, and the genocidal attacks that are happening on Gaza, then you are going to be attacked and people will always be there to criticize.

So I've had messages of hate. I've had death threats sent to me by email. And luckily, none of that has transpired into anything more than just someone thinking they could threaten me. But the reality is the overall experience has been extremely 

positive. Thank you so much for your bravery and courage.

It really is threatening in these times to stand up for Palestine, stand up for humanity and show it, show it with the keffiyeh. For you, you've even been on Sky News and CNN, so you're really putting yourself out there to give a voice to the oppressed. And that is so brave. I'm really happy to hear that hate has not gotten in the way of you continuing that work.

And I hope that everybody listening to us is inspired by that bravery. I know that you've spent a lot of time in Palestine with medical students. You started Oxpal Medlink, which connects Oxford teaching hospitals and medical students in Palestine, which is absolutely incredible to think right now what those healthcare workers are going through and how they are using those skills.

Would you tell us a little bit more about that experience? 

 It's actually called OxPal now. They rebranded it and I'm very much a co founder. I'm not an active member of that at all, but I'm very proud of the legacy that we have left as a team. And as a team of us have set it up, there were three of us co founding members.

And one of them is actually Dr. Tania Hajj Hassan, who is also a co founder of Gaza Medic Voices and has been a dear friend and a huge supporter of the Palestinian cause since like her early activist days and medical school days. OxPal came about as a result of actually the Operation Car Sled.

Escalation in 2008 or nine, when Israel started bombing Gaza, very similar to now, but on a much smaller scale compared to what we have seen now. And as a result of that, I got in touch with essentially the medical community that was supporting Palestinians. So these are people like Dr. Richard Horton, who is the editor and chief of the Lancet, the second largest

medical journal in the world came to Oxford, spoke about the atrocities and spoke about the war crimes and shed light on it. And I very quickly became aware and acutely aware that there was a need to support and show solidarity to Palestinians in the territories. So we found by chance that there was a team of Oxford educators, clinicians, and surgeons who are going out to teach medical students there every year.

So by virtue of that, we decided to support them both physically by going there. We were invited as medical students, but also virtually to then use that link to allow them to have some sort of educational experience where we are providing them with some of the best, most accomplished physicians in Oxford in the university who are in the teaching hospitals to do case based teaching with these students remotely.

This is pre Zoom. So this is 2009 before we even had Zoom or video chat, it was all done by tech space. So I would be on this call with you exactly the same. There will be a room and it will be a PowerPoint presentation that is shown on the screen. And then the students would type their questions and the educator would basically go through the case with them and this was done on a weekly basis. We set it up and then we let it organically grow. And every week we would find, more and more people wanted to teach, wanted to get involved and the students loved it. And what's amazing is that it survived up until now.

So it's still ongoing in the West Bank. So obviously in Gaza, the situation is horrific and there is no medical education taking place because the two largest medical schools have both been bombed to rubble. But yes, it is. something that I'm very proud of to have been involved in from very early on and I hope it continues and I hope we can rebuild it as OxPal 3. 0 for Gaza, as Gaza is rebuilt and the world comes back to help. I hope 

so. My best friend says, from your lips to God's ears. And I'm hoping that so many of us around the world will also be involved and will be your allies and rebuilding that and doing more and seeing our Palestinian colleagues, our health care worker colleagues, come back to a place where they can practice with dignity and be able to help, which is what every health care worker wants to do.

And anything that gets in the way of that, here in our privilege, in the UK and America when we can't practice medicine, when we can't help, that's actually one of the biggest drivers of burnout for us. And so I can't imagine what it's like right now for these healthcare workers whether they're doctors, medical students, nurses, pharmacists the list goes on.

Your profile highlights voices from each one of these professions and you started Gaza Medic Voices. Would you tell us a little bit more about how that started? Yeah, of course. 

Gaza Medic Voices was actually Again, the brainchild of Dr. Tania Haj Hassan, Dr. Rebecca Inglis, who's an intensive care doctor based in Oxford, and one of our key team members from the teaching initiative, and then myself as a third co founder.

So we, in response to the 7th of October attacks, and what we saw was happening straight after within 24 hours, which was a disproportionate response by Israel to start bombing Gaza to the point of annihilation. We could see a very dystopian black mirror like situation where we were watching the news, and we could see nothing except Israel's at war, Israel's being attacked, Israel is being destroyed.

And then. On the other side, you look at Gaza and you talk to your friends and your colleagues and they're showing you pictures and stories of hospitals being attacked, of people being bombed, and nothing was being reported. So we thought, the only way we can amplify their voices is through social media.

Because that's now, often where you need to go to find the truth, we basically started to take snippets of what they were sending us, which was often text based or audio messages or pictures. And basically then filtering through that and, but actually using it unfiltered.

So whatever they said would be written as it is. We wouldn't even change, we might have to do some translation for the Arabic, et cetera, but we were as best as possible sticking to the purest form of it, which is the actual words. And we are just a vessel to amplify their voice. We are not a face, we are not acting as ourselves.

We are just a vessel for them. I think that's why it's reached so many people. I think the number of followers is almost a hundred thousand. It's 90, 000 plus, and in a short space of time to two months, 76 days or even less. So I think it's because of the success of basically just.

hearing the actual unfiltered truth from Gaza that is what people needed to know what is actually happening. And there's nothing less political and more powerful than doctors talking and nurses talking and healthcare workers sharing their truth and saying

this is what we are seeing and when people, see that, they say these medical professionals who put their life on the line, they're being really honest and they're saying some stuff, which sounds pretty horrific. So then they start to wake up and think, I'm sure there's some truth in that.

There's nothing more shocking and awareness promoting and awakening than the truth. And when I was reading some of these posts, I felt the pain, the tragedy. I felt it in my body. I felt it in my bones and it moved me to want to do more. To contact you to carry their voices through you and so I picked a few posts here that I thought maybe you could give us some background about the first one is from a doctor.

This was posted on December 7th. It says cold, hunger and bombardment are everywhere. Diseases are spreading and the basic survival needs are not available. What's left? 

That's, it's stone shivers down my spine, even hearing it. And this is actually, I read it, but I never actually say it out loud.

So when you say out loud, it's it's quite harrowing. But that is a reality. These doctors are cold, they are exhausted, they are frightened, they are petrified, and they have to put a brave face on. They have, they are a caregiving profession. They're having to provide care physically and emotionally.

To patients and often children who are coming in completely orphaned, not only orphaned, but worse, no surviving family, a wounded child with no surviving family. And on top of that, they have to deal with the risk to their own lives and the risk to their families. I heard stories from doctors recently taking their own family members into hospitals.

So their wife and kids or vice versa, their husband and kids, because they said we either die together or we live together. Like, what kind of world are we in where people have to make these choices? 

Wow. I can't even , how does one put themselves in their shoes? It's really indescribable.

It is wrong and unjust in so many ways. This next one is from an emergency medicine doctor who was displaced to the south of Gaza. This was on December 12th. I haven't seen a number of amputations like this within four hours. Since the beginning of this genocide, 56 days ago. 

Yeah, amputations, it's like one of the, it's one of the realities.

Multiple amputations, and you're not talking about losing one limb. You're talking about losing two, three, four limbs. There are children who have lost literally three or four limbs who have, are basically a torso and a head. But that's what's happened because that's what happens when you carpet bomb a whole population. And when you subject them to, collective punishment, purely based on their ethnicity, their birthplace, for them to be unlucky to have been born in Gaza, that is their only crime, these children, they were born in Gaza, that is their crime.

And they're being Collectively punished for it. And we heard these stories from Dr. Ghassan AbuSitta, the famous plastic surgeon who is now in the UK and a dear friend and someone that we have all been watching and following. He was a truth giver and seeker inside Gaza. And someone again, projecting these voices.

He talks about these amputations and he's always affected because he talks about how he has to amputate these kids in front of their parents or even without their parents being there, if their parents have died, then it's just the horror of having to do this to basically take a limb away from a child.

You are subjecting them essentially to a lifetime of disability. And there is no other choice. He's doing it or they're doing it because that is the only solution. Otherwise it's, life threatening. So it's, limb, limbs, limb removing, it's just the reality of being a war zone doctor in.

a war that is like no other because of the disproportionate effect on children. 

We've never seen anything like this before and Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah is really such a hero. You're right. We've all been watching him. For both the doctors that are, helping and trying to do everything they can. Like Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah, and the doctors without borders, This is traumatizing across the board. I'm wondering, from your kind of expertise I don't know actually if there's any science on this or not, but I'm assuming, as a doctor that Palestinians have the highest number of disability from amputations of any population in the world.

Would you agree with that? 

I think for sure now they do. I think for sure, like, if you look at the percentages, if you just do it as a, not an absolute number, but as a fraction of the population, 1. 5 percent of the population has been killed. And so think about the tens of thousands of kids and adults who have lost limbs.

This is a extremely high rate of disabled of children living with disability in the future. And this, in our society, you and I well know. Unfortunately, in our world, despite our best efforts, we are still behind in terms of being able to help people living with disabilities. And we don't have wheelchair access in the same way that we see it in California or in London or in, in LA.

That is a reality. So these children are already disadvantaged by the mere fact that they have lost limbs. And that cannot be understated. It is a really important point to make. The other thing to say is that The emotional and the psychological burden, the disease of mental health disease that, Gaza has by Western standards, one of the highest rates of depression, of anxiety of probably, any mental health disorders.

And many of my colleagues in diaspora, many of my Gazan colleagues, whose families are stuck in Gaza. Many of them have said to me, they have actively thought about committing suicide because the situation is so horrific that they say, the only person who's. keeping me alive is my mother or father in Gaza.

As soon as they die, what good is it for me to survive them? That is a very worrying, worrying trend, but this is a reality. 

Health implications are so staggering and concerning. It's, I can't imagine what it's like to lose whole branches of your family.

So ridiculous, really. And this one is from Doctors Without Borders. I just wanted to share this one here. It says, Doctors are stepping over bodies of dead children to treat other children who will die anyway. And what can we say even about that one? 

Really nothing 

to say. No, it's just speaking for myself. It's like an apocalyptic. It's like watching The last of us or a movie you would never think in 2023, this will be the reality for 2. 3 million Palestinians or 2.

3 million humans. Forget even though they're Palestinian, they're human beings and they've been dehumanized to the point that they are just numbers. And even in their death, even in their death, people are questioning their reality. People question their, the numbers, they question it because it's Ministry of Health by Hamas.

The absurdity of questioning their numbers and that really angers me. It makes my blood boil every time I get asked by media, by anyone, how can we trust these numbers? And I just say, imagine it was your own child. Would you be happy if someone questioned their death, their number and their death?

Like, how would you feel? It is so dehumanizing, but it's unfortunate, it's the reality that we live in. 

 To deny one's trauma makes that trauma even deeper. It really is unbelievable that we're seeing this unfold. This one's from a medical student. It was written on December 9 and the image that's attached to it is a still from a video showing Israeli forces blowing up the Islamic University of Gaza's medical school campus that happened December 8. This medical student says, is this the humanity that governments speak of? Why can't anyone stop Israel?

Where's justice? 

Yeah, for sure. I've taught in the Islamic University of Gaza. It's a beautiful campus with, decent facilities. Obviously Gaza, it's the reality is the majority of the population lives in poverty, but this was a really special campus and the students there were fantastic.

 I saw these videos of Israeli defense force, occupation force troops cheering. The site of this university being bombed and the lack of humanity because they call Palestinians subhuman and they call them human animals, but they are actually worse than animals because even animals wouldn't laugh in the face or smile in the face of a bombing of a medical school with people inside it.

They have lost their humanity. Unfortunately, the West has lost its humanity because, people the silent majority and the leaders of the free world and the Arab leaders and many others just stand by and watch and they don't even, are not even pushing for a ceasefire. Asking for a ceasefire is like their basic need is a basic thing.

When you ask people in Gaza, doctors, what is the one message you have to the world? The doctor said to me, Dr. Ibrahim Mattar, very clearly five weeks ago. Five weeks ago, he said to me, tell you leaders, we don't want your water. We don't want your food. We don't want your aid, and we definitely don't want your prayers and your thoughts.

We just want a ceasefire. That was his only message. We want them to stop bombing Gaza. So when I hear that, and then you see people warmongering and trying to feed into that vitriol and basically allow the destruction and the whole annihilation of a population, it's just, it's heartbreaking. 

Of course.

 At this point, they're just asking for basic humanity. Just treat us like human beings. Queen Rania wrote a very powerful article in the Washington Post. And in the article, she says, No matter what side you support, you can still demand a ceasefire. Some will brush this off as a bleeding heart plea.

It is an indictment of the times. That a call for a return to sanity could be dismissed as sentimentality. We're just calling for a return to sanity. 

 Queen Rania is extraordinary with her words and the power she wields when she says these things. I wish more people could think like her and more people could act like her.

Because if we have more leaders who could actually lead in her, in that way, then we would have more compassion and empathy and we wouldn't have the situation we're in. If you look at every civil society movement, every peaceful revolution, every resistance has always been brushed aside as the bleeding heart liberals that has been the consistent message throughout history.

 The bleeding heart liberals actually start these movements and make change in paradigm shifts. We saw in apartheid South Africa, we saw in many regions of the world. And, again, it's just the easy way to brush it under the carpet and pretend like it's sentimentality.

It's not sentimentality. It's a humanitarian angle. We've been told myself and a colleague of mine, when it went to ask a speaker at a university in the the UK about the situation in Gaza, and we were told, you're not allowed to call for a ceasefire. So I said, on what basis? And they said, it is too political.

I said, it's not political. This is humanitarian. I refuse to share a platform with you if that is your opinion. And they backtracked. But it was just a reflection of the complete warped, warped world that we are in. 

Yes, and thank you for honoring the oath as a doctor to withhold that this is a humanitarian perspective.

This is not political. This is about saving lives. It's about people. This one is from a nurse. It was posted December 5. And as I was reading this, I couldn't help think, are these this nurse's last words? It says, May God bear witness that we have not failed in performing our duties in treating the sick and injured, despite the pain and agony that resided in our hearts. Just upsetting. 

It's just like, it really does sound like someone's last words. And in some ways every time I'm upset, I actually think that the people have been killed in some ways. thEy're the lucky ones, and the ones that survive, that are surviving them, the ones that are left with no family, the ones that have been injured, the children that have no surviving family, that is just horrific.

These are the children that you see on the videos that are shivering, that are shaking with fear, having come, being dragged out of the rubble, knowing that their loved ones are next to them, dying of thirst or hunger, or from a bleeding wound that should have been stopped. Yeah, it's just, it's the pain and the misery is just horrific.

I know we're torturing ourselves and torturing our audience and really, that's what they're experiencing right now. It's torturing. I myself have thought of what would be easier? Would it be easier to just be dead in this situation? Would I just want to die in this situation?

I don't know. It's a very profound question. We know that so far, 130 health facilities have been targeted, 23 hospitals, 56 clinics, and only 9 of 36 hospitals remain active in an area the size of Rhode Island. Already it's overwhelmed and so to bring that number down to nine hospitals that are active. None in the north of Gaza. That is truly a humanitarian failure on so many levels. Hospitals are meant to be sacred sites of safety of healing.

Doctors are dying beside hospital beds. That was also from doctors without borders. And we know now that 110 health care workers have been abducted by the Israeli authorities. And we don't know why we don't know what happened to them. We don't know what the charge is. Some of them have been identified in these torture videos that we've seen, which the Israeli authorities says it's irregular behavior.

However, just like you said, The West doesn't see this in the media. We see this on social media, but the videos of people being tortured civilians being identified among those people, whether you want to call them terrorists or not, they're not all terrorists. And we know that these are health care workers, civilians.

professors, people that are normal people, just like everybody else who have not carried a gun, who have not been involved in any of this. So no matter what angle you want to turn this, abducting these people is wrong and they should be released immediately. So do you want to comment a little bit about that petition that you shared?

For sure. The first thing to say is that 340 healthcare workers have been killed so far, and we know all their names. And many of them were dear colleagues and friends of mine and ours to name a few Dr. Omar Farwana, who is one of the former vice presidents, of the Islamic University of Gaza, Dr. Maisara who was a brilliant medical student and became a fantastic junior doctor. He's been, killed and his pregnant wife now is a widow. So these are amongst many, but there are 110 doctors that have been detained illegally and abducted. So we became aware of that very acutely soon after the storming of Al Shifa Hospital by the Israeli Defense Force.

And when they started evacuating doctors and telling them to take the dreaded, treacherous route from the north to the south of Gaza across that main street, Salah al Din, which, was always being bombed and many of them just disappeared on route. They were taken on the way, many of them were looking after patients.

So in the midst of their caring for patients, they were basically taken away. And that is just unacceptable. Like the fact that we are in a stage where we have to call for the sanctity of hospitals and to say, there's something called a human rights, accord, there's something called international law that protects these places.

It's almost like we've forgotten that. And we have to remind the world. And that is why MSF had to break political neutrality. They've never done it in the hundred and ten year history of how long they've been around for, but they've had to do it because it's like people have forgotten, like bombing hospitals is not okay.

Bombing like cancer wards is not okay. It is just not okay. It is more than not okay. It's genocidal. It's war. It's war crimes. It's a psychopathic terrorist state just , going full Monty basically on a whole population and just annihilating them and that is just not acceptable and the silence of our leaders is deafening and that is the one thing that has been the most upsetting about this on top of the misery, but the silence and the lack of response and the lack of just like willpower and like courage from leaders is just it's, to me, unforgivable, to be honest.

Yes, I agree with you completely. I've been so disappointed by President Biden, by all the leaders in the, developed, quote unquote, civilized world. Where is your humanity? Where is your compassion? And where is the upholding of international humanitarian law that's supposed to protect all of us that was born after the Holocaust?

 To make sure it never happens again. Why are we seeing this now? This is wrong. This is an extermination of another people and Gaza has turned into a concentration camp. We can say that now without any shame. Queen Rania also says this has become an unequivocal humanitarian nightmare with each passing day.

The threshold of what is acceptable falls to new lows, setting a terrifying precedent for this and other wars to come. This can happen again. If it's happening now, it can happen to any people. And so all of us anchoring in our humanity have to say this is wrong. We have to call our reps, send emails, talk about it, raise awareness, do as much as we can to move this in the humanitarian direction because it's so wrong.

So Dr. Mannan, would you mind telling us a little bit more about this Healthcare Workers for Palestine group that you've started also and the vigil that you guys have been running in the UK? 

Absolutely. So this is, I would say, one of the good news stories, which there are not many in this day and age, but essentially it was actually a response to censorship.

We were basically prevented from holding a fundraising event for Gaza and the Royal College of Physicians, which is one of the most prestigious institutions for medical professionals in the UK. We were told that holding a fundraiser for Gaza would pose a security threat to the building. So we went ahead and decided having invited all these speakers from some of them from Toronto, some from the US, one from Texas, they were coming anyway.

And we said, right, let's take the event to Downing Street. Let's just stand in front of 10 Downing Street, which is the residence of the Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in the UK. And let's just make our voices heard and say exactly what we were planning to say, but just make it even more powerful. And that's exactly what happened.

It couldn't have been more organic, but we stood there all side by side. Dr. Tani Hajj Hassan myself, Dr. Nick Maynard, an amazing surgeon who goes out. Professor Ezzedine Aboullech, an amazing Gazan obstetrician whose daughters were killed in the 08 09 war, and 35 members of his family have been obliterated in this war.

Who else? Dr. Musab Nasser, a Gazan doctor who runs a charity for surgical cases. Dr. Ghada Qarmi, a famous physician, activist, humanitarian. fighter for the Palestinian cause, Dr. Ang Swee Yang, the founder of Medical Aid for Palestinians. So these people, these power horses of the last, 20 30 years of the Palestinian struggle were there standing side by side, holding the names up of every healthcare worker.

And that time it was only 80 or 90 doctors on the 10th of November. And we basically called for a ceasefire. And we had the press, we had the media there, we had four to 500 people. And then when that happened, we wanted the momentum to come and people were coming up to us and saying, we want to join and we want to organize this.

And it became very organic. We basically started doing similar vigils across the UK. So the second or third week we had expanded to 20 UK towns and cities. So numbering thousands of healthcare professionals, if you count it up in total, and then other countries started coming on board, Canada, the US, Australia, South Africa, Denmark, the West Bank, Libya, Kuwait, India, Pakistan.

All these countries are holding these weekly vigils. Some of the vigils I don't even know about. I can't even tell you how many cities are doing it now, but they're just doing it. And it's a grassroots movement led by healthcare workers who care about humanity. The thing I was most proud of just watching it happen was on Saturday, just gone, which is a Saturday, the 16th of December last week, we held a vigil, a silent procession of 5000 healthcare workers standing by the main hospital, which is next to the House of Parliament, it's called St. Thomas Hospital in central London. Dr. Ghassan Abu Sitta was at the front, Dr. Nick Maynard, Dr. Hussam Zomlot from the Palestinian Ambassador to the UK. They all led a silent procession because the message was, our silence will be as deafening as your silence and stronger because we will meet you with that.

And we walked. From there to 10 Downing Street and we held speeches and a vigil and a remembrance of the healthcare workers that were killed. And it was a huge turnout. It was so moving to see so many healthcare workers that are normally cautious or scared or don't want to talk. They're in unison and we won't stop.

We're continuing this Sunday. We're holding a multi faith prayer in central London with Jewish, Christian, Muslim faith leaders and other denominations. We'll all be praying for Gaza. Next Friday, we're holding a vigil with journalists and healthcare workers side by side, press fests on holding hands and then just

speaking out for the lack of response and the inhumanity and we hope by then there'll be a ceasefire. I pray that there will be but yeah, so this is an organic movement of youths and healthcare workers across the world who want to Remember and commemorate and talk about their fellows and their colleagues their fellow human beings inside Gaza who deserve better.

There's nothing stronger than solidarity and bridging people who are invested in this purpose of standing up for humanity, seeing people that are oppressed, freed from that oppression. It's so admirable and inspirational to see you go from OxPal to Gaza medic forces to healthcare workers for Palestine.

These vigils that are spreading worldwide. You are a testament to the power of one person connecting to another person, connecting to another person and doing something great that can move the world. With us being in solidarity with each other, standing with each other, it's going to be our biggest protection against all hate that's thrown at us.

And there's so much power in getting together in a nonviolent way and upholding humanitarian values, taking the politics out, putting the ethic over the ethnic. really coming together just to fight for people's rights because when we fight for the protection of all people, we will always be among the protected.

And that's what's important is that we see everybody as equals and worthy of being protected and living a life of dignity. So in the last, 10 minutes we have with each other, Dr. Mannan, this has been so profoundly insightful and sad and hopeful in so many ways. I wanted to amplify a little bit more of the awesome work that you've been doing.

Would you share with us about Dr. Fly? 

Sure. I always feel very reticent about talking about this, especially in such a crisis, but it's actually relevant. And I'll tell you why it's relevant. So Dr. Fly is a British Egyptian telehealth startup, which was co founded by myself and my best friend and dear brother Dr.

Hattem El Emem, who is a general practitioner, so family health doctor based in London. He's from Alexandria originally, and I grew up with him, in the UK, we lived together for many years. And we basically wanted to provide second medical opinions to Egyptian patients in Egypt who wanted to, get another opinion from a specialist whether it was cancer care, oncology, cardiology, pediatrics, obstetrics, whatever it is. And we basically were setting up a network. We had 30 or 40 British Egyptian doctors like myself, who are dual qualified in Egypt to license practice in the UK. To basically form that connection.

And there was many prongs and arms to this. We were working on educational programs, similar to OxPal. We were working on visiting doctor programs of sending doctors to Egypt to work collaboratively with the doctors on the ground. Now, why this is relevant to this is in fact, when this happened, Gaza Medic Voices very early on, I put out a call to basically ask for doctors to provide their services for telehealth.

And that was just a sporadic sort of, off the cuff moment. We had 40, 000 followers. I thought, why not see who's engaged? And the response was overwhelming to the point that I, we now have a database of almost 7, 000 clinicians, mainly doctors and surgeons across the world, literally across the world who have all signed up and said, we want to help.

 The difficulty is, as you may know the telehealth sector is extremely fragmented. There are many startups, many companies, some established, some are not who are keen to help. So through my connections, knowing other CEOs of other startups in the MENA region Middle East and North Africa, we basically are forming a telehealth cluster similar to how the WHO operates with their physical clusters.

And we're having a meeting hopefully in the next few weeks to discuss how best to use all our efforts to provide pro bono services to people in Gaza and the West Bank and the Palestinian diaspora outside, who are a crucial part of this story. So we are hoping to utilize this database and allow it to be used in the most effective way possible

to provide free care and it will be a mix of, looking through some complex cases, providing second opinions, talking from doctors to doctors, because the way medicine is practiced in the UK and the US and many Western societies now is through multidisciplinary teams. Very often it's very unusual for a single doctor or a single surgeon to make a decision about a complex patient.

It should be done within a team. The models that we want to implement in the Middle East it is there, but it's obviously not as advanced as in North America and Europe. So that is a long term goal and this will be months down the line once Gaza goes through a rebuilding stage and we can actually communicate with people in Gaza because that is one of the difficulties at the moment.

Yes, that is amazing and important when we want to think how else can doctors and health care workers in privileged places like us participate in this and try and advocate. That's one avenue is to plug into these initiatives. Contact Dr. Omar, contact healthcare workers for Palestine try and make connections so that you can offer services you can make a difference I know that people can also donate, the health care workers can donate health care workers can put on some of these vigils that you're putting on in collaboration with you.

I think it's really important to highlight some more groups on the ground. That are doing amazing work in the health care space, like the Palestine Children Relief Fund the Gaza Kinder Relief, who's a group of volunteers that's helping children receive medical care outside of Gaza because they're so complicated Inaraorg, which is actually Dr.

Ghassan AbuSitta's initiative and doctors like Dr. Haytham Ahmad, who is on the ground caring for these cases. What else would you say to health care workers? 

In terms of what they can do, I would say speaking up and being able to have the courage to speak up to colleagues and educate people who are not educated about this.

And I know it takes a lot of courage. I know it's difficult in some workplace environments. We've seen it, especially North America. I know of many cases in Toronto. In other Canadian cities where doctors have been either threatened with, their license to practice as a result of speaking up.

But I think the safety comes in numbers and the more people speak up, the safer we are together. And I think being able to learn about educating yourself about Palestine and the history, and then being able to educate others is crucial because that advocacy work does wonders. It really does and then, as you said, being able to, if you have a skill set that involves being able to even go on the ground, potentially in the future to help them, there are many organizations that are leading on that.

Medical Aid Palestinians, Doctors Without Borders and many others. I would say those are the two things people can help with. Apart from that, again, fundraisers doing fundraising events, raising money for health workers for hospitals for equipment to go in because that will be needed.

There will be no shortage of money for Gaza. I'm hopeful of that. People will pay in the, in the buckets, but I think every penny is going to help when it comes to a multi billion pound dollar project to rebuild the whole of Gaza.

Half of Gaza has been destroyed, and so it's going to take a worldwide and really humongous effort to see dignity restored in Gaza for all healthcare workers and all people. So to end our podcast, would you share with us a notable post, poem, or piece of writing that you've encountered during this conflict?

Yeah, absolutely. I was hoping to just read out a poem by a famous Palestinian poet who was killed recently, unfortunately, by an Israeli airstrike. This is , Refaat Al-Areer and this poem by him says, if I must die, you must live to tell my story. To sell my things, to buy a piece of cloth, and some strings, make it white with a long tail, so that a child somewhere in Gaza, whilst looking, while looking heaven in the eye, awaiting his dad who left in a blaze, and bid no one farewell, not even his, to his flesh, not even to himself, sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above, and thinks for a moment an angel is there, bringing back love.

If I must die, let it bring hope. Let it be a tale.

May Allah have mercy on 

you. May Allah have mercy on you. May Allah have mercy on all the heroes and the tragically lost people that you highlighted today. Thank you for sharing that one. That man is a huge loss for all of us, for the whole world. Especially the cause of peace in the Middle East.

Really to end our time together, I'm so thankful, first of all, that you came on for this connection, for all the work you're doing, your profound humanity, your investment in this. We are lucky to have people like you in this space to collaborate with and get inspired from and learn from. So thank you so much for sharing who you are with us.

Thank you, Hani, for having me on and thank you for your time

Thank you so much. To end, I'm just going to say a little prayer. Is that okay with you? Of course, please go ahead. May all beings everywhere thrive in peace and dignity and share in all our joys and freedoms. And may we see true peace in the Middle East for all in our lifetime. Amen. Thank you. Amen.