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Mohammed Mustafa says one of the hardest things for him to deal with during his work as a volunteer doctor in Gaza was the scale of death he witnessed, including the high number of child victims of the war.
The Australian emergency doctor returned home to Perth after his second stint in Gaza, from March 11 to April 10, with the Palestinian Australian and New Zealand Medical Association. He had first gone in June last year, when 38,000 Palestinians had been killed, and that number had exceeded 50,000 by the end of his recent visit.
“I'm a humanitarian. I don’t believe in killing people whether Arabs or Israelis, whether they're Jewish or Muslim or Christian,” Dr Mustafa, 35, told The National. “I believe in the sanctity of life wherever it is, and in Gaza, you don’t see that with the amount of people that get killed.
“You don’t see the sanctity of life any more. Blood is cheap on the streets of Gaza, and that’s the difficult thing to process,” he said.
“It’s a very difficult job when you go [to Gaza]. You're limited with the resources you have, you're dealing with complex injuries, and you're dealing with multiple injuries that come in all at the same time. There's no triage because of the sheer influx of people. People come in, people bring in bodies, there are distressed families, there's multiple women and children, and there's so many people that are critically injured,” he said.
“There's a lot of people that die that don’t need to die. If we had the right medical equipment, they would have survived.”
Dr Mustafa said he and other medics had to deal with multiple cases at the same time, especially during mass casualty events, including people injured in missile strikes, crushed under bombed buildings, hit by shrapnel or bullets. The majority of patients were women and children, he said.
“One of the hardest things to deal with was that the volume of child casualties was well over 50 to 60 per cent.”
He said the Al Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza city, where he was working, received 156 bodies, most of them children, after Israeli resumed its bombardment of Gaza early on March 18.
“I don’t think that’s normal for any human being to see that many children killed. I'm only human, all these things will affect me, and that was one of the things I mentally prepared for before going into Gaza. But there was a lot of people that died in my arms, so it has been very difficult to process that.”
He recalled one incident, when he was treating a boy whose chest had filled with blood and was struggling to breathe. As he tried to save him by opening his chest and inserting a tube without anaesthesia, he felt the hand of a woman lying under the bed grip his ankle.
She reached out to him with her other hand and said: “Help me.” With his hands inside the boy's chest, Dr Mustafa said he could not help the woman right away. When he looked down to check on her after he was finished, she had bled to death, still holding on to his ankle.
'I'm not a hero'
Videos of Dr Mustafa's return to Perth went viral after crowds gathered at the airport to welcome him.
“I didn't expect such a reception, but people were cheering and people came up to me, complete strangers, hugging me and handing me flowers,” he said.
“It was so overwhelming, the support that I received. But I think that just goes to show you how deeply affected everybody is by what’s going in Gaza and it's resonating throughout the whole world, that even somebody like me who's just a doctor that went there to help, I come back to a hero’s welcome,” he said.
The people welcoming him were not only Palestinians, or Arabs or Muslims. There were “teachers for Palestine”, “Perth moms for Palestine”, senators, doctors, nurses and families, he said.
“Those people are not pro-Palestinian, they're pro-humanity, they're pro-keeping children alive.”
Dr Mustafa said he believes the true heroes are the people in Gaza.
“The paramedics and the doctors there and the civil defence who go out and dig people from tunnels and collapsed buildings, those are the people that deserve the praise, not me.”
Despite not wanting the attention he has received, Dr Mustafa said it gave him a platform to spread awareness about what is happening in Gaza.
“We need humanitarian intervention in Gaza, we need to help these children,” he said.
“Those kids should be able to dream like every other kid. Those people deserve the same security and freedom as all of us, and they deserve to dream like all of us, and that’s all I wish for as a doctor.”
