It is a lovely Friday evening in February and I leave my house with the two cars and safe young children and head to the Muslim Community Center of Tucson, the sky streaking a blood-red orange against the Tucson Mountains.
It is a gathering of multi-ethnic and multi-generational folk, a Tucson Dinner for Gaza tonight, with featured speakers situated in this new gymnasium, round portable dinner tables populate the entirety of the basketball court. Feelings hum beneath the surface of the couple hundred in attendance — passion, song, silence, rage, horror, even merriment. Such is reflected in the gifted oratory of a Palestinian Muslim-American from Brooklyn, Linda Sarsour, a racial justice and civil rights activist, organizer, author, and, as stated on her Instagram account, “every Islamophobe’s worst nightmare.” She shatters stereotypes of Muslim women.
An oncologist from Stockton, California, Dr. Yousef Khelfa, presents before Sarsour. He is slender, well-dressed, and articulate in his second language after Arabic. He exudes at outward, earned grace.
Khelfa recently led a medical team into devastated southern Gaza, specifically the European Hospital in Khan Yunis. He spoke how he, along with a pair of surgeons, an anesthesiologist, and a nurse, spent two harrowing weeks performing emergency care — from wound treatment to amputations — beyond their usual expertise; his team had never encountered such explosion-induced injuries before. He returned earlier this month.
His talk included a slideshow, shots of his long journey from Egypt to southern Gaza, the miles of parked humanitarian aid trucks that weren’t allowed in. He spoke of the unspeakable human suffering, the nearly two million displaced souls without anywhere to go, food or adequate sanitation.
His work is nothing short of heroic; the team and hospital colleagues faced a bomb-ticking clock in Gaza, saving lives that may be blown up the very next day. He could’ve been murdered at any time. (Already on February 20 an Israeli tank fired without warning into the Doctors Without Borders humanitarian aid worker shelter, killing two and injuring six more.) The scope of this ongoing tragedy is inconceivable.
But it was his empathy for the children of Gaza that held him there. His voice softens as he speaks about them, how a father’s voice tempers unconsciously when speaking of his children.
When he finishes his presentation, I introduce myself and we agree to speak several days later. He is gracious when I interrupt a family dinner with his wife (also Palestinian) and three children, aged 12-17.
As a Palestinian-American, he faces oppression from stateside media misinformation about Palestine (“it is totally different when you watch the news in the States then when you witness it first-hand”), and the insane loss of civilian lives in Gaza, including 14,000 Palestinian children (some by snipers).
It is difficult for him to explain what he saw. This has nothing to do with his command of the English language, it is, he says, the beyond-words horror of hatred and human destruction.
Khelfa is the former president of the Palestinian American Medical Association (PAMA), the non-profit he co-founded with a friend in 2013. He is on the board and very active in fundraising (like the aforementioned event in Tucson) and the very difficult mission of sending medical teams over to provide emergency help.
PAMA’s goals include immediate medical relief to Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank, and to establish support programs. In years leading up to October 7, he made several trips to Gaza, to help with its collapsing health-care system. Before the Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7, “the healthcare system was collapsing for years, now it is completely collapsed.”
Khelfa was born in the cultural city of Nablus, Palestine, a 3000-year-old city in the northern West Bank, born into the Israeli occupation of his homeland. He grew up the youngest of three brothers, sons of a laborer/factory worker father. He didn’t have freedom or money. “Israeli soldiers could stop me, or shoot me at any time. What I lived through, you don’t understand until you grow up with that, thinking of yourself as subhuman. They wanted to break the soul of the Palestinian – but they didn’t.”
As a boy he lived through the First Intifada, a Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation which erupted in late ’87. The streets became battlefields of stone-throwing and tire-burnings, a rise of symbolic Palestinian resilience in the face of oppression, which lasted until 1993. Khelfa saw people hurt, injured, traumatized, including himself. That’s when he knew he wanted to help, go into medicine. “You feel like you want to heal people. This unconsciously built itself up inside me.”
In his teens, through faith, study and self-reflection he began to grasp that he was not “subhuman.” In grade 12, he tested first in his city and 7th in all of Palestine, winning a full scholarship leading to medicine. He completed his medical training at Al-Quds University in Jerusalem and his residency at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New Jersey as a Fellow of the American College of Physicians. The oncology/hematology specialist is a highly rated-expert in his field.
When he speaks about the Israeli and American governments, his voice never rises into anger. It remains calm, refined, and almost deferential.
“I didn’t have freedom till I moved to the states when I was 27, when I go back home to visit, all the checkpoints, the smell of the gas, the death. It all comes back.”
We return to talk of Gaza. His fear, determination.
“I have to go in. Period. Maybe you feel terrified, yes, but this is what I have to do. It’s not like I went there and didn’t understand the consequences.”
He had a conversation with his wife before he left. “Maybe on the way home from the airport in San Francisco I might have a car accident and die. Whatever is written we cannot change. We leave it to God.”
He didn’t tell his children where he was until he was there. His daughter called crying. His son texted him saying he was proud of his dad.
He is haunted still. He hears a woman’s voice screaming for Allah every four seconds at night with no pain medication to ease her suffering.
He tells of bombs exploding nearby, 24/7, closer than a kilometer. Of tens of thousands of people living in the hospital, the rooms, the wards, the ER and OR, in stairwells, in over-crowded tent rows on the hospital grounds. It rains, and he sees the tents filling up with water, the mothers and children inside, with no shoes in the mud and cold.
Children losing limbs, the power cutting out, roof tiles falling in as he worked on patients, many mourning the loss of spouses and children. Displaced women going into labor with no mid-wife. The stench and panic and starvation, a breeding ground for further infection. There is no peace, no rest, no joy, no privacy.
“We were able to save some,” he says ruefully.
Patients in pain or dying cannot be helped, vascular injuries and infections lead to amputated limbs, which lead to more complications, because there is no anesthesia and very little medical equipment or antibiotics. Post-surgery, patients have no place to rest that is clean.
“It is beyond any words. People die as hospitals are seized and evacuated. People are lacking the very basic needs.”
Khelfa points out that hundreds of thousands of patients with pre-existing illnesses have been left without any care. “I’m an oncologist, and there is no chemotherapy because the devices in the hospitals got bombed.”
“My colleagues there are very resilient, but I could see the fatigue in their eyes. They work 24/7, 300-plus of them have been killed, 100-plus abducted, and there are reports some are being tortured. It is getting worse and worse.”
“I think of my life of privacy, talking to my children, my wife. Putting my head on a pillow at night.”
As an American taxpayer, he pays into a government that is supporting mass murder in his motherland. How does he reconcile this?
“It is a struggle inside of me. We as a community need to raise awareness, whatever it takes, educate people, call your congressmen. The US media is biased toward Israel, it is unbelievable. As good citizens, our duty is to stand for what’s right and what’s wrong for any injustice, whatever it is. My duty as a proud Palestinian-American is to raise my voice, to help people who are helpless and hopeless, who are not being treated the right way under oppression.”
He continues, “God will ask at the end of the day; did you do your best? Anything that comes out of struggle and pain will come out beautiful and strong. I believe that. Part of my [personal] rehab is speaking about it. This country was built on immigrants. To disassociate ourselves from this fact, keeps us from what this country is.
“I am trying to understand what will it take for the world and the US administration to consider the Palestinians as normal human beings. They cannot absorb any more pain. We keep hearing it’s going to get worse.
“This country received me, opened their arms for me. But I will stand and say what’s wrong in America, and I will stand up and say what’s wrong in Palestine.”
There is no wrestling with the wisdom of the Israeli attacks on Palestine. These are atrocity crimes against humanity. The US, Israel’s biggest ally, has fat, moneyed influence. President Biden could call an immediate and comprehensive cease-fire, likely with a phone call, as Reagan did in ’82, demanding then-Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin stop the bombings of west Beirut. (Begin did, in a matter of minutes.)
I ask the doctor if what he experienced was genocide. He pauses a moment. Then he whispers, “Yes.” And he is planning on returning.
After another moment, he adds, “My best meditation was talking to the kids, who’ve lost everything, were displaced with nowhere to go, and suffering. They are so full of kindness and so resilient. They are traumatized, yes, but they laugh, and I will laugh.”
This article appears in Feb 22-29, 2024.