Eleanor Goldfield: Dr. khalidi, I was wondering if you could tell people where you are in the Gaza Strip and what the situation is like at this current moment. We’re recording this on Wednesday, September 18th, 2024.

Dr. Khalil khalidi: so Gaza Strip is literally a small strip, as you said, like, before the seventh, I used to do marathons, charity marathons, and we would go from the top north to the top south in two and a half, three hours.

By running not a very fast speed, like you can say 20 kilometers per hour. So it’s very, very small.

Currently I am in the middle, in the middle district, in Deir al Balah. The last safe, quote unquote, safe zone, as instructed by the IDF. And right now the situation is very shaky, unstable. There is a lot of bombings happening, especially in the safe zone.

I’m sure you’ve heard of the last few massacres happening in tents, and how people were buried alive because of the explosions. Schools have been targeted like two, four days ago, a school in the middle area in Nuseirat camp was bombed. Four UN teachers who were volunteering to help with the refugees and distribute aid got killed, along with plenty of families.

Yesterday, by dawn, there was an artillery attack with tanks bombing a residential area at the east of the middle district in Burej Camp. Seven families were killed. So yeah, the safe, quote unquote, safe zone is not so safe.

When it comes to food and when it comes to supplies, we are very short. Obviously, many of the supplies and many of the food, comes to us from the Israeli side after their approval, and most of it is sold to us.

The aid is crammed on the border. Most of it doesn’t get to us and the few that does get to us is not fairly distributed and most of it gets sold to us after it’s been stolen as well. Hygiene products, soap, deodorant, Dishwashing soap as well, מטהרי, disinfectants are not existent or very, very rare.

So we resorted to improvising using the traditional methods of crafting soap as we used to do. We are the Palestinian so, well known for our olive oil soap. We call it the Nablus soap, so we start making our own soap . So we use herbs, we use, we recycle materials to use it. What else can we speak about?

The transportation, transportation is very, very tricky and very, very dangerous. So you only transport from an area to another. And I’m not talking about transport, transporting from a city to another or from a district to another. As you might know, in the U.S. or big cities like Manhattan and such.

No, transportation is literally, on your perspective, is from going from a block to another. It’s very tricky. We are allowed to like, to transport or walk in day hours only. After the sun sets nobody is allowed to leave because they will be targeted immediately for suspicion, quote unquote.

So, and transportation methods are very primal and very primitive: donkey carts, bikes, some of the cars that work on what we improvised as car fuel, which is made of vegetable oil and thinner solvent that we used to use as paint, so we made it to, we use it as fuel as well. And the cars themselves are actually bombed and very damaged. I can send you pictures of how the car would look, literally like a cartoon.

In, in the, it’s like the, you’re watching in the cartoons where the car is bombed or where something is very like damaged and it’s barely working. So yeah, that’s what we use for transport.

Education is not existent right now. None of the schools are working, because schools are turned into shelters, as you might have seen in the news and such.

Hospitals are barely functioning. We don’t have any supplies. We don’t have any medicine back to like down to the most basic of medicine and most basics of needs like dressing, analgesics, simple, over the counter analgesics. We don’t have them.

Eleanor Goldfield: So, in your work as an orthopedic doctor, what do you have, what do you have to use when you try to help people?

Dr. Khalil khalidi: When I have an injury, I would literally use what I have, which is what’s on the patient mostly. So at some point, some of the patients will still have some like clothes torn or torn apart or, you know barely covered with something, so I will use it. I will wash it, and I will drench it in disinfectant, which we made locally, and I will use it as padding or as dressing for the wounds.

We will take some cotton and we will make it as padding for the cast. I will use recycled casting materials to stabilize fractures and to fix them into positions. When it comes to the surgeries. We barely, we don’t have surgical gowns, let alone long sterile ones. So we just operate on a table as it is, which makes like rates of infection or rates of spread of complications very, very high.

So yeah, it’s very challenging. It’s hard to describe right on the spot and I’m trying to give you an idea of what it might look like. Well, yeah, it looks like you want to cook something, but you don’t have the ingredients. So you improvise with a pretend game that you cook something.

It’s like when you play with a five year old or six year old and you pretend to have a tea party while you don’t have the tea. That’s how our work feels like. And it’s very frustrating because you know how to deal with such thing and it’s very, very preventable and very easily treated, extremely easily treated.

But there are no resources, there are no equipment, there are no facilities, so you just stand there and you feel sometimes useless or sometimes like you’ve been chained to a wall, chained or shackled, and you cannot reach for something. And that’s how it feels like.

Eleanor Goldfield: And I mean, you mentioned the infection.

Do you have anything to treat that? Do you have antibiotics? Do you have pain medication? Do you have any kind of medication to give people?

Dr. Khalil khalidi: We have basic antibiotics and we use them when the infection is very severe and is very rampant. Most of the cases that we have, have infections because it’s been going for so long, most of the bacteria that we’ll deal with are resistant to these regular antibiotics. So what we would resort to either amputate or either, as we call it, debridement, which is cutting off the flesh that’s been infected and hope that the new flesh doesn’t get infected. And, that by itself adds a more layer of depth to the magnitude of the problem because many people, we are an educated society and they understand that this is an infection and it could be treated.

So you have many people refusing that sort of treatment because they don’t grasp the idea that you don’t have the medicine to treat it and you’re trying to save their life, not save their limb. So, until it reaches to the point that they feel their life is being threatened, they ask you to intervene or they ask you to amputate, and most of them get lost, pass away due to that complication, and doesn’t get counted in the death toll, because it’s not the direct death toll.

The direct death toll that’s been announced here by the Ministry of Health is retrieved bodies that’s been identified. That’s it. That’s the number. The 40,000 are the people that they’ve been identified with retrieved bodies, dead on the spot, not the people that died from infection, not the people that died later on ’cause of other complications, not other people that haven’t been identified yet, the unknowns, not the people that are still stuck on the rubble and recorded as missing. These are not included in the statistics or the list that’s been published lately, like four days ago by the Ministry of Health.

Eleanor Goldfield: And of course you have people who were sick before October 7th who then couldn’t get treatment that have died and they’re of course not counted either, I’m assuming.

Dr. Khalil khalidi: That’s another story. That’s another story. We have the direct death toll. We have the direct death toll, which means that people who have been killed directly and arrived dead. And, only those who were identified and retrieved were included in the statistics.

And we have the indirect or preventable death toll, which is basically people with chronic illnesses, people with like cancer, or heart attack, or diabetes, or children who died from dehydration or dealing with malnutrition and such and such and many of the newly delivered babies, newborns are born with CB because the delivery is very delayed and there are many complications and it’s very primitive.

Nobody talks about that. And add to that, there are plenty of disabilities and plenty of life altering, like irreversible damage to people that’s not being talked about as well.

And part of the statistics in which we discuss about statistics, even my people and our part, because we have been dehumanized so much to the point that we don’t include men, or we refer to men as something negligible in the statistics, and we don’t pay like much attention to that, to the fact that these men are the providers, are the protectors, are the helpers, and these men will be the ones taking care of the children and the women.

So you have in the statistics being announced, they say you have this death toll, half of which are women and children. This percentage are elderly and we have men as if we confirm to the narrative that these men are the fighters. These men are the terrorists. These men deserve what happened to them.

Meanwhile, these men are the people who you see in the hospital carrying people from under the rubble, digging with their own hands. You see these men standing in line to get water or to get food for their family. These men are the ones who, are the ones who are building tents. These men are the ones who are protecting the children and the women from the stray animals, from thieves, and getting them the medicine or try to get them medicine and treatment and carrying them back and forth and responsible for the transport of these people.

So that’s another issue that nobody talks about it enough, which is the men of Gaza. Because, to confirm into the narrative that these men deserve what goes into them is to affirm to the fact that yes, there are people fighting back or there are people attacking and they have the right to defend and such and such and that argument, which is invalid and not true whatsoever.

Eleanor Goldfield: Thank you for highlighting that. I’ve long I felt that it was really disgusting that we did not talk about the men or even boys of Gaza. It was just kind of glossed over in a very dehumanizing way. And I wanted to ask you a bit more about the supplies. You said that Israel has to confirm whether they can come through.

Where do they come through and are there any ways to get supplies that don’t come from Israel? Like the Rafah border with Egypt, are there other ways that you are able to get supplies

Dr. Khalil khalidi: not what nothing at all right now, as you can, as you can tell, like Rafa has been taken over and the northern border has been taken over and it’s literally an enclosure.

Very, very like and a prison enclosure or literally it’s a concentration camp. We’re not gonna sugarcoat it. It’s a concentration camp and nothing gets in, nothing gets out unless the IDF approves it including supplies, including aid, including medicine, including the people that come in and go out. And currently nobody gets out unless they are within a medical mission in coordination with the W.H.O. or unless they are cancer patient or severely wounded children. And that part of the severely wounded children. We’re going to talk about it later. It has many concerns about it.

When it comes to supplies, as I told you, nothing comes in unless it’s approved by the IDF. And most of it are supplies that are not essential for survival.

Like you will see sometimes they send us ramen noodles. Instant ramen noodles packets to feed on, which is literally cancer, as we say, it’s toxic. Many of the canned food is only, would expire, like the canned food would expire within two months or three months. So you don’t have the chance to save up, or you don’t have the chance to store it. And sometimes they will send us frozen chicken wings or frozen meat. And they know. It’s very sadistic because they know we don’t have fridges. They do know we don’t have electricity. So that meat has to be eaten within a day or within two days. Sometimes they will send you a deodorant, but they don’t allow soap, for example. Sometimes they allow perfumes, but not detergents, not disinfectants. Sometimes they send fruits, but they don’t allow vegetables. Sometimes the other way around. 

So it’s literally a game for them. It’s a game. And we deal what we have. We learned how to preserve food. The old method of way we learned how to store. We learned how to exchange between one another, which was, and that’s how we deal with it with the supplies. But no, nothing comes in.

And, the supplies that we receive are being told sold to us with 10 times or 10 folds the price. Like a bar of soap is approximately $7.

Shampoo will cost $50 to $60.

Vegetables. Okay. So pricing, there is a point that I will have to note and tell the people abroad about. We have two situations here in Gaza Strip. We have the north of Gaza and we have the south of Gaza, and they are separated. The north of Gaza is a million times harder to live in than the south of Gaza. The north of Gaza, when it comes to goods, they don’t have anything.

Barely, they will get a truck or two every month or so. And the prices there are a hundred times than the prices in the South. So the North of Gaza, a tomato, a one, one tomato will cost up to $30 for someone to get it, to get one. In the South, it will cost a dollar, $2, which is insane for one tomato, but this is what we have, and we have to survive.

But in the North, the North is absolutely starved to death. And it’s part of the sadistic psychological torture that they put on us, in which I am in front of the world, I am allowing them food, let them eat food. Oh look, the tomato in the North is rotting. They eat so much, they don’t need that fruit, let alone, they don’t tell the world that this tomato is literally 20 dollars or 30 dollars and they cannot sustain to have a tomato for the whole family

So that, that I don’t think many in the world understand that this is two situations. One is more severe than the other. It’s like the bits of hell. The north you, the more north you go, the deeper in hell you go..

So that’s about the price tag and the supplies. I hope that gives you an idea, but if you have, like, if you need more intel or more explanation?.

Eleanor Goldfield: That, that absolutely helps. And you had mentioned that you wanted to come back to the point of severely wounded children, and I was hoping you could describe that a bit more.

Dr. Khalil khalidi: So here’s the thing, because I am in the hospital and I deal with many severely wounded children. We have this term in Gaza and Gaza only and we’ve been having that term since 2008 from the first ever aggression, we’ve had so far nine to ten aggressions, each and every time every few months to few years, they will have a very like, they call it war, they call it war, in which the planes come and attack and bomb and kill people.

And it’s referred in their terms as mowing the lawn in which they kill some of us so we don’t overpopulate, to save us from overcrowding in the beautiful prison that they put us in. So the term, Wounded Child No Surviving Family means that the child has been severely wounded and they are the only survivor or the sole survivor of the family.

These children are being taken out for treatment, further treatment by NGOs, by institutions under the approval of the IDF. And that file itself is not being talked about, because people assume that, yes, these children are being evacuated to safety. These children are being taken out to be treated, to be dealt with, to, to have a better life and such and such.

And they compare it to the children that have been taken about or evacuated during the Holocaust in World War II.

These children have no guarantee of coming back. Many of them have no communication with the remaining survivors of their family, their relatives, aunt, second cousin, third cousin, they have no communication with them.

And their destiny or their future is completely unknown. And many of them are, we lose track of them as like doctors and as people, as physicians who used to treat with them and to attend them because we essentially adopted them in the hospital. Many of the children became our own in which they live with us in the hospital. We share the food with them. We laugh with them, we play with them and such and such before they were taken away. And after that, neither us nor anyone would have direct contact with them. Sometimes children with, like you have the mother severely wounded, not approved to come have treatment, to go have treatment abroad, and the children is taken away from her, but they have no connection or no means of communication between them. And that’s very concerning because it’s paraded as like a virtuous act while in fact, we have no idea what’s going on. Are these children being taken, being trafficked? Are these children being taken to be raised up as people from another society?

Are these children aware of their own origin from, of their own history? And that, that tracks back to the history of many cases of ethnic cleansing in which these children, because they are precious. I’m sorry, there was a bombing.

So, um, these children are being taken away because they have very precious DNA or genetic makeup. That genetic makeup could be used to justify the ancestry of a certain population that’s sent to ethnically cleanse that original indigenous population. So, when we have these children being raised of a certain like, of an Israeli origin or something like this there, and we, like, do a study of, okay, the genetic makeup, and they are the Semites, they are the indigenous people, and that’s very dangerous, and it’s been used in America, it’s been used in Canada, it’s been used in many places, in which you have people claim to be the indigenous or the original people of that land.

You have the route of child trafficking and the horror, the horrors that go with child trafficking in which you don’t know. So that’s another part that we are deeply concerned about as Palestinians here, and we have no choice about it because it’s either that child die or like, or live. But how would they live and where do would they live?

You don’t know, and you just, you just hope for the best.

Eleanor Goldfield: Absolutely. I thank you for pointing all that out is, of course, very twisted. And I’m glad that you use the term ethnic cleansing because the, ripping a child away from their own history and their culture is ethnic cleansing, just like we’ve seen in the United States with the indigenous population here.

And I wanted to ask you, you said that a bomb just went off. What, I mean, obviously the safe zone is BS, it means nothing. But how often are there bombings where you are? I mean, I assume you’re in your home right now. How often are there bombings where you are?

Dr. Khalil khalidi: Very often, like every few minutes. I’m not sure if My phone picks it or does noise cancellation or something like this.

But you can hear clashes right now. There is the buzzing of the drone and there is bombing every like 20 to 30 minutes.

That’s another point that they play it as a video game. So whenever they board the tanks just launch randomly, like throw bombs or throw missiles randomly, whether it’s a home or a land or just random, it doesn’t matter ’cause it’s a playground for them. Literally. And many many people from the IDF had posted about it and talked about it, how fun it is.

And we have this rule here. If you hear a drone, you are safe because the drone is here to inspect and record. And once the drone becomes silent, there is a bomb coming, that the target has been like locked in.

And if you hear the bomb, you are safe. As you can tell, I heard a bomb, but I didn’t like bother checking or what, because yes, the bomb, if I hear it, it’s not on me. So I’m good. As long as you hear a sound, you’re good. But once you don’t hear the sound, is when you are very, very worried. It means that it’s very close to you, or on you.

And people who have survived always tell us that. Okay, I will be sitting, and I will just hear like an air vacuum, kind of sound, like this sound and I will go blank and I will wake up in the hospital or wake up by people pulling me from the rubble. Or you wake up in heaven.

One of the three.

So that’s our rule. If you hear a sound, you’re good. If you don’t hear a sound, be worried. And to teach that to a child, that’s another story because I don’t know how our children grasp it or how our children view it. Okay. But they know this rule very well, and I’m telling you this rule because we simplify it to the kids to not be worried.

Okay? You hear the sound good, but if once the drone comes silent, you have a child, your child or your cousin or any children in the hospital rushing to you and hugging you and tell you, I love you, you know, can I come or next sit next to you? Because they know once something gets silent, there is something coming.

And that’s how the children deal with it, or how the children survive this. Not survival, like, I don’t know if it’s okay to say how they go through it, but yeah.

Eleanor Goldfield: They cope, I guess, but I wanted to ask you about that too, because I saw a video where you were speaking about the difference between post-traumatic stress disorder and chronic stress disorder.

And I was wondering if you could share a bit about that.

Dr. Khalil khalidi:  So in psychology, I have a diploma in psychology, trying to help the people because we don’t, like we are in dire need of something called psychological first aid, which is how to make people at least calm down during high stress situation or a panic attack.

One of the thing, one of the concepts that are, like, very common, pretty common, commonly known in the world, for not even people who are very well oriented in the world of psychology or the science of psychology is post traumatic disorder, PTSD, but it’s rarely talked about when it comes to it happening over and over and over with the stress or with the threat being persistent for a long period of time.

So a PTSD is when you deal with a trauma, you have a stressful situation, and after that, your brain starts to process it, because it wants to heal from it. So you start to process it, and that comes in with the symptoms that should have been happening during that instance. And you try to, like, you start healing, and you start acknowledging, facing your fear, dealing with the trauma, having closure, and such and such and such.

When it comes to continuous stress disorder, continuous traumatic stress disorder, sorry. When it comes to that, the threat is persistent. And you have a trauma after trauma after trauma after trauma. So after a while, your brain becomes so used to high levels of stress hormone, which is cortisol.

And it becomes pretty much dependent on it. and the centers of the brain or centers of your psyche and the parts of your psyche, sorry, that are responsible for healing or processing such events becomes less and less active and less and less prominent. So your perception of reality and perception of what goes on becomes dulled and numb.

And that’s what you see with people who have been through for a long period of conflict in conflict zones, and that plays a part of why many, you know, just many Palestinians and many people of Gaza are so convinced that they are helpless, so convinced that they are of less value, so convinced that they have no potential, so convinced that they cannot live the life of the other people that live abroad.

And that creates a society that’s been internally dehumanized, not just externally. And part of it are, like, the symptoms of it, that as I told you, you have our government, or the people of the Ministry of Health, not acknowledging men as men. It’s because they have been so psychologically abused, trying to prove that they are human, to the point that they gave up on men so they can approve to the people, to the world that yes, okay, men, done case, we are over it, they are terrorists, kill all the men, at least save the children, save the women, you have them saying so.

You have people, you have people working here trying, like, feeling the need to perform like animals in a circus to garner attention and to garner support or to garner financial aid or something like this. So you see people posting their children dancing, posting their children laughing, trying to confirm to the narrative that they are the resilient people, the people of hope, the people, the underdogs and such and such, so they can have that support.

Like I posted it so shortly, this noon, I posted two videos in comparison. One of the videos are a Palestinian man who created this beautiful tent. It’s a beautiful, beautiful tent. And he planted a greenery and he groomed the trees around it and made it look like a camping trip for his children.

And it had so many shares and so many positive comments, justifiably so. But that, that on itself is concerning because people will praise something that makes them feel comfortable rather than face the fact that this tent, the same tent, the video after it, has no attention whatsoever, but it’s in the same encampment, the same type of tent.

And it’s been worn out because of prolonged sun exposure for the past year. And the sun is very harsh. We live on a shore. And because of the exposure of the salt and humid air and such, you see the plastic ripping apart and falling apart. And because winter is coming and winter has started, there was a very small, like, little drizzle rain, not an actual rain.

And many got drenched, many tents falling apart. That beautiful scenery got destroyed. That’s it. All of a sudden, because of some a little bit of rain and some wind and it’s gone, but people didn’t pay attention to it. So you see our people because of this continuous traumatic stress disorder, feeling cornered or feeling obligated to perform that they are okay.

And in psychology, there’s like a common saying. We say to people who are going through depression, people facing mental illness and mental disorders, that it’s okay not to be okay. We always tell them this. It’s okay not to be okay. You can tell us that you are not okay. You can ask for help, that doesn’t make you any less.

But when it comes to us, it’s, you are not okay and you don’t have the right not to be okay. Because the minute you start complaining, the minute you start making people uncomfortable, they are going to withdraw from you. They are going to ignore you. They are going to deem you as sensitive or deem you as negative or deem you as someone who is a debbie downer.

And they will go to the person who is performing this performance of, yes, I am the resilient one. I am smiling despite the pain. Because that makes people comfortable. That makes people feel less guilty. They’ll be like, yes, they are going through hardship, but yeah, they are doing fine. They don’t need me. I don’t need to worry about it. Okay, let me just send them money and that’s it. And they will be fine. And that’s concerning.

And the second point of that, of the same thing of building tents and such, in 1948, when the first Nakba started, people got displaced into camps here in Gaza Strip. And they lived in tents.

And because it was going for so long, these tents couldn’t stand the rain, couldn’t stand the sun exposure, couldn’t stand all the environments and such. So people started building houses and these houses turned into actual buildings and actual buildings turned into cities. So the cities that you see in your footage or the cities that you see in your videos and social media or in the news are camps.

Jabalia, Beit Hanoun, Nusayrat, Breij, Deir el Balakh, Khan Younis, Rafah. They are all used to be camps. So, for it, for me to witness that people are starting to embellish their tents and starting to build, like, walls or use, like rubble to make housing, quote unquote, it’s so alarming. It means that what’s been done is done, and you’re not going to return to the way you were.

You are being displaced again. And we are people of pride, we are people of high education, we are people of knowledge, and we cherish history so much, and our heritage. Each and every family will have the key to their house that they lost in 1948. And now we have two keys. We have the key of 1948 and the key of 2023 or 2024.

And that’s another issue that’s not being talked about. Displacement are being, we are being conditioned that this displacement is irreversible. You have no hopes of return. That land is being lost forever, and you have the officials on the other side, on the Israeli side, declaring it as a water park, or as a resort, or as this and this, and they are starting to auction land there.

So, that’s something that’s not being discussed, and not being looked at, and not being addressed, because people here, are under continuous stress traumatic stress disorder. They are so busy with trying to survive, so busy with performing that they are fine, that they don’t talk about such issues.

So it’s layers upon layers and upon layers and it’s like all built on top of each other. And it comes to years and years and years of conditioning for 70 and it’s been going for 75 years. And this is the result. You see people like taking advantage of the chaos that goes on. And that’s no part of our tradition, no part of our history, no part of our pride or culture to start to create like scam campaigns or create or steal from one another or perform gangs and such.

And they want this like situation to happen. They want this behavior to start spreading to create the chaos and they come as the savior. Oh, we’re going to take over. We are the saviors. And we’ve seen it, we understand it, and because we’ve read, and we’ve seen events before in other nations, with many native people, we try to prevent it, we try to talk about it, but it’s How can you talk about such thing when you are still trying to survive all this?

You are still trying to, like to find your ends meet, as they say, or when you’re trying to have something over your head or dodging a bomb or checking if there is a safe area or not, and they are deliberately using, so if you follow the news every week or so, they launched a new map of leave here, go there, leave there, go here. So it’s a constant, constant state of like insecurity and of fear of instability. And they want us to stay in that round so we don’t have the awareness or we don’t look into what they are doing in the bigger picture.

Eleanor Goldfield: Absolutely. And I think it’s so important that people understand Palestinian history, particularly here in the U.S. שo that they understand the original Nakba and the layers of this traumatic stress, so that we can also be ones who don’t forget, because I think that is our job, especially as people in the United States.

And, I don’t want to keep you too long because if you don’t have to save lives, I imagine you do need to try to sleep, or be with your family.

But I am curious because you obviously are so multi-talented I mean, you’re an orthopedic doctor, you have a diploma in psychology, but you’re also a brilliant artist.

And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how you’ve used art in order to keep stories alive when you can’t keep people alive.

Dr. Khalil khalidi: So I consider myself one of the lucky ones or one of the blessed ones to have the gift of awareness and to have the gift of what they call, that I had my grieving for what my potential life would have been, has not been due to this, and it’s been going prior to the seventh. It started when around 2019, 2020 when I’ve noticed that I guess I am considered less than the other people around the globe. I am denied certain opportunities. I am prevented from rights. Many rights.

And you start this, it goes throughout the full grieving process of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, then acceptance. And then comes after that, yes, this, it is what it is. What can I make of it? What’s my purpose in it?

So prior to that, my art was focused on the, what we talked about, the performance aspect, but it was going through not just performing for the sake of performing, but it was going to proving that I am human enough.

So one of my projects was about skin disorders that I’ve been seeing in the hospital during my rotation in dermatology. So I’ve seen skin disorders, many of them are treatable, many of the are not contagious, many are genetic, untreatable, and many of them are not contagious, and they don’t affect your actual health or your actual productivity, and they don’t prevent you from being part of society.

And I use that as a part to symbolize that, yes, you might look different, like a few examples of it are like albinism, vitiligo, and such and such. So yes, you can look different. But you are the same human. And I use it as a way of telling the world that appearance or where you come from or who you are doesn’t matter.

We are made of nations and made of tribes for the sake of getting to know one another and to exchange knowledge, to have that big concept of collective knowledge that’s used for the growth of society and the growth of humanity and for the good, the greater good, for creating peace and there is beauty in diversity and there’s beauty in culture and there’s something to learn from.

And the value of someone is not related to their appearance or where they come from or their ancestry or their past. So that’s how my art was focused on and after that my art started getting for a short period of time pretty angry because I was going through the grief process.

So it was pretty angry, not angry in a way of like projecting hate or making slogans, or smearing other populations or other people or certain group or certain demographic. No, but it was angry in a way of why don’t you see this? Why cannot you see what I’m seeing or understand what I’m trying to say or understand what I’m trying to express?

And I felt so gaslit about it because I didn’t announce that I am a Palestinian or I live in Gaza. I didn’t announce any of it and I made my art speak for itself. And I am thankful for that. Because it made me understand the other perspective around the globe, many people who saw my art reacted to it from the perspective of their own societies and from the perspective of their own experience.

And it was between 2019 to 2022 so pandemic happened. Black lives matters movement happened, Sheikh Jarrah events happened. The Uyghur genocide was gaining more and more publicity. Congo started to rise and have more awareness about the Congo. So you open your eyes and see, okay, I am not alone in this.

I experienced oppression. Many people, everywhere around the globe, experience oppression. Why are not they aware of it? And that’s when my direction started coming to, let’s make my experience, not talk about my experience itself, but make it raw emotions rather than talking about the event itself, a date or a certain situation or certain name and such.

Make it a feeling. And that’s what I did lately with the 991 painting that I painted with an unknown child.

Eleanor Goldfield: I’m pausing here to include the video that Dr. khalidi posted of his artwork and the story behind Unknown Child 991. I feel it’s important to note that this video and artwork was posted on May 7th of 2024, so the numbers that Dr. khalidi shares are no longer accurate. The numbers are far greater now.

If you have the ability, if you’re listening to this only, if you have the ability to also view this portion of the interview, I strongly recommend that you do so.

I’m also going to be reading the words that Dr. khalidi posted along with this video now.

Blood samples labeled unknown 991. 991 was a young boy, unalived during a carpet bombing. He took his last breath as I was checking his pulse. All we know about him is male, 9 to 12. died in airstrike. No one knew his name.

His whole family was wiped out, along with most of the neighborhood. This is what happens during carpet bombings in which a whole residential complex or neighborhood is bombed all at once, killing hundreds and injuring more. 991 passed away before we could send his samples to the lab. 991 was left on the cold floor for three hours with nothing by him but his samples before they took him to the morgue.

So I decided to preserve these samples in a unique way. As paint.

991  is one of 48 kids that have passed away in my arms during the past 200 days, still counting. I’ve become very familiar with what the last breath looks like.

It’s haunting.

Most would die with no one to bid them farewell. Alone.

In the past 200 days, I’ve treated 37 unknown children, age range one month to 10 years.

These children are sole survivors with no family left. Over 40,000 souls taken away, of which 19,000 children. Not a single funeral, most buried in mass graves. It’s a privilege to be buried, as many are stuck under the rubble. Some had their bodies eaten by stray dogs and cats.

And that’s the story of the Unknown Children of Gaza. 9 9 1

Dr. Khalil khalidi: So I didn’t want to put photographs of the child or say that this child had this and this. I want people to be uncomfortable and to understand what it’s like to lose your child.

Not only lose your child, but your child is going to die alone. And what’s your actual reaction about it. Are you going to react as yes, it’s yet another number? Because that’s how you deal with people, with dehumanized societies, such as us, such as people in Congo, people in Sudan, people in the Uighur, in Ukraine as well.

They are just numbers. You see it, it’s, it had moved from numbers to estimated numbers, even. You see in the news an estimated 15. What about the 16th or the, like, are you just estimating? I want to try to deliver that emotion and what I’ve done with my painting about the ice cream trucks of Gaza, the ice cream being used as morgue to store deceased bodies and cadavers and what kind of impact with a child, a sole surviving child have to have their whole family pulled from an ice cream truck, something that used to bring them joy and bring them safety, and it’s supposed to make it, to be their happy place and happy memory when they grow up. To see their whole family being taken out of the morgue, not the morgue, the ice cream truck. We call it the morgue. It’s been like, you see the impact on us, we call it just the morgue right now. So you have a child calling it like the cadaver van, they call it. Pulling out of it and they are like laid in front of the child, not only their family, but everyone in that truck in hopes that the child will recognize some of them.

So you have children looking at dead bodies, not only their family, but other people. And they are not dead in the sense that we see in movies and such, like, peacefully of natural causes dead, but mutilated dead.

So that’s what I’m trying to express during my art right now, is to never forget, never forgive, and never again.

We want to break that cycle. What, no matter what, we want it to end with us, and no other people after us have to experience such. Because the damage has been done, as you can tell, as we are speaking, the damage has been done psychologically, physically, the infrastructure of the city is wiped out, memories has been undone, each family has been wiped out from the civil records.

So, It’s irreversible, and we don’t want any other nation, any other group of people to have to witness that. And that’s what I’m trying to express in my recent art project and my direction with art. It’s just, I want, I want the world to understand, I want the world to be accepting of the idea that emotions such as sadness, grieving, anger, disappointing, fear. I want these emotions to be normalized. I don’t want them to be something that’s uncomfortable for people, like for people to just ignore or to escape from or to seek to heal from.

If you’re not angry when your fellow human is feeling, is facing injustice, when would you be angry? If you’re not sad for the loss of innocent lives, when would you be sad?

These emotions are here for a reason and I really hope I can, like, portray that in my upcoming projects and my upcoming artworks for people to actually grasp the idea and project on it on their own societies. Because, for example, freedom, the concept of freedom, America is the land of the free. And it’s named so, but I can see your smirk of like, yeah, right.

And I understand, I understand very well, because we are forced to understand your history and we are forced to understand your society and your culture for us to survive. So I consider myself having, like, a very clear idea of what it’s like to be in America, of course, not the full perception, I’ve never lived there, I’ve never seen there, but from what I’ve seen, and because the American culture is so vast and so out there. And it’s considered the common practice in movies and cinemas and such. So it gives you an intel.

But yeah, America is considered the land of the free. Yet, I don’t see freedom at all. You see candidates performing a circus act, essentially. And everyone in America knows it. Yet nobody is having the ability to say or the right to say, let’s put them both down and let’s launch a huge, like select new candidates that are worthy and they are qualified enough. These two are clearly disqualified. So let’s start over.

But no, because it’s built on a system and that system is built on benefit and it’s built on capitalism and built on industrialism. So once you start to tear that down, many people will oppose you or stand against you because many are benefiting from this chaos and benefiting from that system to the point that they will kill to have that system stay and survive.

So sometimes I told my people, like my friends there who live in America and other countries, I believe that we are more free than you. Like you are afraid to lose your jobs. You are afraid for your identity to be noticed at some protests and such ’because you’ll be chased down and you’ll be persecuted or you’ll be frowned upon, and you’ll lose many opportunities and such and such in the name of freedom. And many brave souls were not afraid and we commend them and they give us like the warmest of hugs by their acts.

But yes, it is a fact that that’s not absolute freedom.

While in fact, I’m not afraid to lose my, for example, my freedom lies in, you know, I’m not afraid to lose my job. I’m not afraid to lose my house.

I’m not afraid to lose my city because it’s been gone already. There’s nothing to lose. You have nothing to, like, you have nothing to lose other than what you have. So, that itself gives us some sort of freedom. And we also have, like, sometimes I jokingly say that us, by existing, we revoke each and every victim card ever used in humanity.

Because we understand what it’s like to have that, any sort, most sorts of oppression. We understand what it’s like to be discriminated against for something, for simply being who you are. We understand what it’s like to be discriminated against for your religion, what it’s like to be discriminated against for your ethnicity.

We like, we know what it’s like to be treated as a slave, to work for nothing except to get some crumbs of food, to be treated as a number, to not have a name, to be treated as a subhuman, to be referred to as an animal, literally. We understand what it’s like to be unrecognized for what you do, or unappreciated for what you do.

We understand what it’s like to be gaslit when you try to express what goes on or try to tell the world what goes on and you are being gaslit, that you are being delusional, or that you are to blame and you are part of the problem. It’s been going for 75 years and barely, barely the world is waking up and starting to awake to the fact that yes, oh, you’ve been facing this for 75 years? You have been occupied? You are being ethnically cleansed? Oh, yes, we have been saying so for 75 years. We have been screaming about it. We are, and we are constantly being said, oh, it’s too complicated of a topic to be discussed. It’s too political.

You are to blame. You are the ones who don’t want the peace. You are the ones who are not giving in. You are the ones who are being aggressive. You are the uncivilized people.

Which, thankfully, there’s a shift and there’s more awareness about it, but it’s hard to recover from at once, and change will never happen at once, and with that comes a fear of ours in which it’s a passing trend in which it happened over and over for the past aggressions. There was a movement and there was an awareness and there was protests about what goes on. But the moment a ceasefire happened or a truce happens, back to square one and it’s gone. And we hope that this is not the case and that more people are awake to what goes on, so yes.

Eleanor Goldfield: Yeah, absolutely. And it shouldn’t’t have to take a genocide for that to be the case. And Dr. khalidi, I know that you’ve been very generous with your time. And I just wanted to ask if there’s anything else that you’d like to share about your current situation, about experiences or anything else that you’d like people, I mean, predominantly people in the United States to know or even to do.

Dr. Khalil khalidi To tell a story, I don’t have like a direct story on top of my head, but what can you do, so, what can you do is sometimes, there are like three, as for the lack of a better term, three triggering sentences that are being repeated over and over again to us in response of what we go through.

And it’s, it comes from a very good place and from a genuine place of caring, wanting to help and wanting to check on us and such and such, but I want to bring awareness to it that one of the sentences is like, oh, okay. I hope you are okay, and I hope you haven’t lost someone. Each and everyone in here has lost at least five to six people, their family, or their friends, or their neighbors.

So don’t say, I hope you didn’t lose someone because sometimes it opens wounds and many haven’t grieved it and haven’t faced it yet.

And when another sentence when people say, Oh, I’m sorry, I haven’t contacted you for a while, or I’m sorry, I haven’t spoken with you for a while, I was taking a break from the scenery and from the footage that I see.

Yes, that’s your right. And that’s a very healthy thing to do that you have to take care of your mental health. Don’t tell me that. Don’t tell me that my existence makes you uncomfortable. Don’t. Because you will see many people being like, I am sorry that we are dying. What would my response be? I’m sorry.

And the third response is, I am sorry that you go through this. There is nothing I can do. I wish I could do something. Yes, you can do plenty of things. It starts with educating yourself. It starts with starting conversations and talks. I’m not saying go to protests. I’m not saying go scream on top of your lungs or share footage, graphic footage.

No, don’t. But after you educate yourself, start conversations in your circles, in your workplace, in your neighborhood, with your friends, when you go out. Like, start that conversation. Educate others the same way that you educated yourself.

And, also don’t support hate speech, don’t support things that, I don’t know if it’s legal in your state or not, but many states it’s been illegal the world boycott.

So try to do that as much as you can because it helps and it does have an effect. And try to check as much as you can on people. If you have contact with people on the ground, whether they are people working there have some sort of communication with them, start conversations with them, try to make it casual and normal.

Don’t make it as you feel pity for them or don’t over romanticize what they go through as the heroes or the, because it creates that narrative and that narrative weighs down on that person to try to fit into that narrative. So it will turn into an unintentional gaslight situation to the people here.

So just have conversations with them, make them feel heard, make them feel like not alone. And that they are remembered, that you care for them. And so these are things that you can do, easy things, I hope, not so demanding, and that’s it, I believe.

Eleanor Goldfield: Absolutely, and thank you.  I’m also kind of amazed that people will say those things to you, but I guess I’ve lost my ability to be shocked in a lot of ways.

Dr. Khalil khalidi: It comes like we are in the term of educating one another and if it wasn’t for communication, we wouldn’t understand such things and these conversations had been had prior with many many other things. Like you in America, I’m sure you had conversations about what’s proper to say to a black person, what’s not proper, the Asian people, people with mental illness, people of the LGBT community and such.

There are plenty of things that are proper and improper to say and they are known so because we’ve had conversations about it, which we are in right now, and I really hope people who listen to this or watch this start to understand that yes, we understand that it’s coming from a genuine place and coming from a kindhearted intention but, no. Please see our perspective and there are better ways to say it.

Like, instead of, I hope that you are okay, I hope that you haven’t lost someone. Are you okay? Start with the conversation of, are you okay? An open question. Instead of saying, I’m sorry, there is nothing to do. We have talked about, you know, yes, there are things to do. And if you cannot do them, just don’t say that I cannot do nothing.

And the third one, what was the third sentence? Yeah, I took a break because I couldn’t handle the photos or scenery. Just say I was busy, I was dealing with some stuff. I hope that you are well, tell me, give me an update for you are going through. These are my updates, that will be more appropriate and more helpful, I believe.

Eleanor Goldfield: I mean, it kind of reminds me about how white people will sometimes in the US say, gosh, I’m so tired of hearing about racism. Well, how tired do you think people are of experiencing it? Like you might be tired about hearing about genocide, but how tired do you think they are of living it? Like it’s an absurd way to center yourself that’s really disgusting.

But I want to let folks know where they can follow you. You’re on Instagram @ K H A L, Dr. Khalil khalidi, and is there anywhere else that you’d like to let people know where to follow you or where to get information?

Dr. Khalil khalidi: I’m not very keen on social media, like I have the Instagram just for the sake of it.

I don’t have other social media, but yes, people can reach out and they can communicate with me. I am more than happy to provide intel, to provide insight and to answer their question if they have any questions about it. Whatever I can do to help my people, as they say.

Eleanor Goldfield: Thank you so much, Dr. khalidi. I really, really appreciate it.

Again, I’m honored that you were able to sit down with me, this

Dr. Khalil khalidi: The honor and pleasure is all mine, as we say. May you be forever blessed and highly favored.

Eleanor Goldfield: Likewise. And may you get some rest and may you have many, many, many days ahead of you of beauty and joy.

Dr. Khalil khalidi: We hope so. All of us, inshallah, in good deeds, as they say.

Eleanor Goldfield: Yes.

Dr. Khalil khalidi: Thank you for having me. Thank you so much.