On a weekend when much of the U.S. media was fixated on the latest tariff spat with China, a small group of doctors in Boston was focused instead on the humanitarian crisis worsening in another part of the world: Gaza.
Israeli forces had – just hours before the doctors met in the Harvard medical campus – struck Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital, Gaza’s only remaining Christian hospital and, according to press reports, the last fully operating hospital in Gaza City.
As the doctors gathered, the ironies of the time seemed everywhere: The day of the bombing was Palm Sunday, the month of meeting was National Arab American Heritage Month, and the discussion about the collapse of the health care system in Gaza took place in Boston’s world-renowned Longwood medical area.
None of these themes seemed lost on the doctors – Yipeng Ge, a family physician; Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a plastic surgeon; Thaer Ahmad, an emergency physician; and moderator Lea Sinno, a project manager at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. Nor did any of the doctors – the first three of whom had served for periods of time in hospitals in Gaza over the past year and a half – let the destruction of the day go unnoticed. To them, it was yet another devastating blow in an 18-month-long series of blows to the already decimated Palestinian health care infrastructure. Though the Israeli government claimed that it was targeting a command and control center at the location run by Hamas, that group denied Israel’s claims, according to press reports. Hamas was responsible for the Oct. 7 2023 attacks inside Israel that Israeli forces say justifies its ongoing raid on Gaza that has killed at least many tens of thousands of Palestinians and flattened vast areas of land, including neighborhoods, health care centers, schools and other infrastructure.
The doctors, who were that day speaking at the April 13 Arab Conference at Harvard, described the horrifying realities of the ongoing Israeli bombardment and what they saw: starvation, disease, pain, and death.
They also described the early signals that convinced them the war was a “genocidal” campaign from the start: the attack on health care facilities; the blocking of food, water and supplies; and the demolition of everything needed to live normally. They also described facing bias and institutional silencing — for example Ge was temporarily suspended from the University of Ottawa and was reprimanded by the Canadian Medical Association over his social media posts – and the failures of the international humanitarian system. How could Western help take on the impossible task of saving Palestinians amid an overwhelming onslaught that it was also supporting and in some cases financing? they asked.
“As a community, as a world, we have failed in this genocide,” said Ge, who traveled to the conference from Canada. Ge, who has been an outspoken advocate of Palestinians and indigenous peoples in North America, was profiled in the Sampan in February.
Ahmad agreed, calling out the “hypocrisy” of the system that he said fails to incorporate Palestinian voices.
Speaking just weeks after the Trump Administration gutted much of United States Agency for International Development and moved to formally dissolve the agency, Abu-Sittah declared, “We’re witnessing the end of the humanitarian sector.” Additionally, he criticized the existing sources of aid as denying Palestinians’ agency.
“What we need is not charity, but solidarity,” said the doctor.
At the same time, Abu-Sittah said, as the world has let Gaza devolve into genocide and as the Trump administration is deporting activists at home in the U.S., “fascism has now come home to roost.”
— Adam Smith
