U.S. Doctors Back From Gaza Say the DNC Speeches, Rhetoric Feel Like an Alternate Reality

Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, who treated patients in Gaza earlier this year, says she’s “personally held the hands of children taking their last final gasps with no family alive.” Now, she and other doctors are watching crowds chant “We love Joe!”

By Kylie Cheung  |  August 20, 2024 | 6:40pm
Politics Democratic National Convention
U.S. Doctors Back From Gaza Say the DNC Speeches, Rhetoric Feel Like an Alternate Reality
Doctors including Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, Dr. Tammy Abughnaim, Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, and Dr. Thaer Ahmad speak to reporters gathered in Chicago for the Democratic National Convention about what they witnessed while caring for patients in Gaza. Photo: Kylie Cheung

Warning: This story includes graphic descriptions of death and violence.

CHICAGO — On night one of the Democratic National Convention, throngs of crowds cheered for both mentions of Joe Biden and calls for a ceasefire in Gaza. The crowd’s response is a frustrating contradiction to pro-Palestine protesters, Uncommitted movement organizers, and especially, American doctors back from serving in Gaza. They all gathered on Tuesday for a press conference set up near the convention to share gut-wrenching stories of their Palestinian patients’ suffering, plead for a ceasefire and arms embargo on Israel, and present a sobering reality check to the cheer and festivities of the DNC. As Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan put it, they “cannot unsee what we witnessed, it gives us nightmares.”

The official Democratic Party platform adopted on Monday doesn’t call for an arms embargo, even as doctors stressed that a ceasefire is impossible so long as the U.S. unconditionally sends Israel bombs and weapons. These are the same weapons that have resulted in these doctors treating an endless stream of children “carried in pieces by their loved ones” to overrun hospitals, Dr. Ahmad Yousaf said. Since October, Gaza’s Health Ministry reports that Israeli forces have killed more than 40,000 Palestinian people, though the death toll is likely much higher. In January, the United Nations estimated that 70% of the dead were women and children.

Dr. Feroze Sidhwa told journalists he “saw children’s heads smashed to pieces by the bullets that we paid for, not once, not twice, but quite literally, every single day.” He continued, “I saw mothers mix what little formula they could find with poison water to feed their newborns, because they were so malnourished themselves they could not breastfeed.” Sidhwa “saw children who cried out, not because of pain, but because they wished they had died along with their families instead of being burdened with the memory of their siblings and parents, charred and mutilated beyond recognition—all, of course, with American weapons.”

June Rose, an Uncommitted delegate from Rhode Island who identifies as a proud anti-Zionist Jew expressed frustration with the levity of political discourse at the DNC: “As I stand up here with these incredible healthcare workers, who ‘hero’ doesn’t even begin to touch their impact in the world, I think about how lost our politics has become, when on one side they’re talking about Kamala Harris’s laugh, and on the other side they’re talking about Donald Trump’s spray tan—all while this is happening in Gaza with our weapons,” Rose said. “This is what politics is supposed to be about. … It’s about healing the world and its incredible number of problems, none bigger in this moment than 16,000 children being unnecessarily murdered in Gaza.”

The atrocities the doctors described were often unbearable to even hear. “I personally have held the hands of children taking their last final gasps with no family alive, all their family killed in the same attack, unable to comfort them during their final agonizing breaths,” Haj-Hassan said. “There children who are fortunate enough to survive their injuries are discharged into a Russian roulette of 100 different ways that they could be killed by the conditions manufactured by the Israeli military campaign—another bombing, starvation, dehydration, disease.”

Yousaf also recounted trying to treat a woman who was 20 weeks pregnant when she was brought to the hospital with “burns that covered over 70% of her surface area” after a bomb dropped on her while she was in her own home. The burns were “a death sentence in an environment where we have no gauze, no clean water, no antibiotics.” He and several other doctors who addressed reporters recounted personal experiences with being barred by Israeli officials from bringing in medical supplies, or seeking supplies to save children’s lives and being denied. “Every day she lived until she died, she was in pain because we didn’t have the medicine to care for her pain,” Yousaf said. “There’s no reason the bomb dropped on her head had to be made in America.”

Dr. Thaer Ahmad recounted treating a five-year-old girl in May whose leg had been “nearly blown off” by a bomb. The same bomb killed two of her younger siblings and “her father lost both of his legs.” They were attacked while sheltering in what they were told was a “safe humanitarian area,” Ahmad said. “This is the world that the children in Gaza have to grow up in. If we have a ceasefire tomorrow, are they going to forget what’s happened to them over the last 10 months?”

Dr. Tammy Abughnaim said she just returned from Gaza in July. “When we press the Biden administration for an arms embargo as physicians, what we are saying is we cannot do our jobs as bombs are falling. We cannot do our jobs as Israeli snipers target children,” she told reporters. “We cannot do our jobs because Israel has made our jobs impossible, with the direct support of the United States. I cannot tell you how disheartening it is to know, as I’m standing in front of a patient pulling shrapnel out of their body, that my tax dollars have paid for this, and my president and vice president are in full support of this.”

Imploring reporters to tell their patients’ stories, even amid the backdrop of the DNC’s nightly festivities, Ahmad stressed that “there is no whitewashing this. There is no music you can play on the main stage during this convention that’s going to make us forget the sounds and the tears of all the children that we saw laying on the hospital floors that we worked at.”

In July, Harris met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his visit to D.C. After their meeting, the vice president said she’d pushed Netanyahu to work toward an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. “The images of dead children and desperate hungry people fleeing for safety, sometimes displaced for the second, third or fourth time,” she said. “We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering.” Uncommitted organizers expressed they were thankful for Harris’ tonal shift, but “ceasefire” can’t just be “a political talking point.”

“If President Biden were here, I would look him in the eye and say, ‘President Biden, you’re lying to us when you say you’re working for a ceasefire, but you are sending more and more bombs that are blowing up babies into a million little pieces. You’re lying to us,'” Abbas Alawieh, a delegate and leader of the Uncommitted movement, said. “Is it unreasonable for us to ask, on behalf of children, to stop sending bombs? That’s not unreasonable. We’re being very reasonable, we’re being good Democrats.”

 
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