Theo Von:
Today’s guest is a doctor from Wisconsin who recently returned from a two-week medical mission trip in Gaza, where he provided aid at one of the last functioning hospitals there. We’re going to talk about all of it — the tragedy, the ups, the downs, the diabolicalness, the hope. I am very grateful for his time. This episode can get a bit intense or graphic at times, so if that’s not for you, this may not be for you. Today’s guest is Dr. Aziz Raman.
Theo Von:
Dr. Raman, thanks for joining me today.
Dr. Aziz Raman:
Thanks for having me, especially on short notice.
Theo Von:
Yeah, I appreciate it, man. Let’s just get right into it. You’re a doctor, and you just completed a service in Gaza. How do they say it there?
Theo Von:
What hospital were you stationed at over there?
Dr. Aziz Raman:
Nasser Hospital. You’ve probably heard on the news that it’s the last functioning hospital in Gaza, and it truly is. There are other smaller hospitals, but they’re really not functioning at the scale of a proper hospital.
Theo Von:
And how do you get chosen to go there? You live in Milwaukee and currently practice medicine there. Do you go through your own hospital?
Dr. Aziz Raman:
No, this had nothing to do with my hospital. In fact, I didn’t even tell my hospital I was going. I just told one colleague, who helped me with my schedule, and then I reached out to one of these organizations. They got back to me when a spot was available and said, “Hey, we have a spot available in two months. Are you willing to go?” When I got that invitation, I was on a plane back to my family and all I could think was, “How am I going to tell my wife, my kids, my mom, my dad?” I landed, the kids were put to sleep, and I went to my wife and said, “Hey, let’s have a cup of coffee.” I told her about the opportunity and she said, “It’s Gaza.” I said, “God, how did you know?” She knew — because this has been going on for so long, and I’d been talking about it at work and with friends. I would call it — and many would call it — a genocide, even though it hasn’t been legally defined. It hurts, man. I found myself coming home after a good day’s work and just feeling unhappy. There were kids dying out there. I was taking care of adults with alcoholic cirrhosis — people who had made decisions that affected their livers — but these kids are innocent. And then I’d come home and see my own children running up to me asking to play video games, watch TV, have some snacks. That dichotomy was so hard to reconcile. So when I got this invitation, it was almost an opportunity to decompress — strange as it sounds — in a war zone. Like a paradox: why would you decompress in a war zone? But I almost needed to do something with my hands. I’m a proceduralist by background, so I like to work with my hands.
Theo Von:
What does “proceduralist” mean?
Dr. Aziz Raman:
I’m an interventional radiologist — actually the first interventional radiologist to go to Gaza in the world. It’s one of the newest specialties in medicine, where we use image guidance to perform minimally invasive procedures. For example, historically if you had a large infection in your abdomen, they would surgically open it to drain the infection. Now we can take a CT scan and insert a drain directly through the skin. Instead of a one-hour procedure, it’s five minutes — no hospital stay, no sutures. We can also remove clots from the arteries of the legs for diabetics, among many other things. It’s a whole different specialty — officially credentialed in 2013, around the time I was graduating medical school.
Theo Von:
So your wife signs off. How long after that are you on a plane to Gaza?
Dr. Aziz Raman:
Two months later, I’m on a plane to Amman, Jordan. Even though I had my family’s permission, I still needed permission from the authorities — and that means Israel. Israel makes all final decisions about who comes in and who goes out. As you may know, international journalists are not allowed in. Doctors and healthcare workers are essentially the only people permitted entry, and even that is heavily scrutinized. We had 22 applicants for this two-week medical mission and only six of us were approved.
Theo Von:
So there were 22 applicants from around the world?
Dr. Aziz Raman:
Yes — 22 physicians from across the world who intended to come for those two weeks. The organization I went with, Rahma Worldwide, based in Michigan, deliberately over-accepts applicants knowing there’s about a 75% rejection rate. Some people flew in from the UK, some from Egypt, and were turned right back around after receiving denial letters in Jordan. You find out whether you’re in or out 12 hours before entry — 10 p.m. the night before, when they send you the Excel document showing your approval status. And even after being accepted, you still have to pass through the Jordanian checkpoint, the Israeli checkpoint, and then a Gaza checkpoint. What would be a three-hour journey without checkpoints takes 14 to 16 hours.
Theo Von:
Does Palestine have any say in who enters? Is there a Palestinian authority you go through?
Dr. Aziz Raman:
There’s no border crossing controlled by Palestinian governance that determines entry or exit. It’s all Israeli and Jordanian. Jordan gets you through to the Israeli side, where Israeli authorities check your bags, conduct background checks, inspect your passport, and issue a document authorizing entry.
Theo Von:
Take me through your first day arriving at the hospital.
Dr. Aziz Raman:
We left Amman at 7:00 a.m. and arrived at a safe house around 11:00 p.m. They fed us some pita bread and hummus and apologized for not having a proper meal. We didn’t actually reach the hospital until the following morning — Friday morning — about 24 hours after we left Jordan.
Theo Von:
Were spirits high? Was there excitement? Or were you just exhausted?
Dr. Aziz Raman:
The six of us — it was our first time going to Gaza. Some people have been multiple times. We were excited. We were like, “We’re going to save Gaza. We are going to do it.” It was a great group; we were all there for the same mission and the same reasons. I had a five-month-old baby I’d left behind. One of the guys had a six-month-old, and another had a two-week-old. Our wives had all let us go, so we bonded over that too. The energy was high.
Theo Von:
How many doctors were at the hospital?
Dr. Aziz Raman:
That’s tough to answer. Hundreds. The reason is that another major hospital in Khan Younis — the European General Hospital — had been destroyed shortly before we arrived. Israel said there was a Hamas operative in a tunnel beneath it and dropped a bunker buster in front of the hospital, essentially shutting it down. All those doctors and nurses were then redirected to Nasser Hospital, creating an overabundance of some specialists. But there is a systemic targeting of specialized physicians in Gaza, so certain specialties are critically understaffed. For example, there were only two neurosurgeons in the entire hospital.
Theo Von:
What do you mean by “systemic targeting”?
Dr. Aziz Raman:
According to UN data, approximately 500 physicians and nurses have been killed and 1,000 injured. Around 300 remain in custody. One hospital director — a pediatrician named Husam Abu Safia — has been in jail since December, with no charges against him. He’s a remarkable person. One of the most iconic images of his arrest shows him as the last person to leave his hospital, because he refused to abandon the incubated babies. Once they finally left, he walked toward the tanks in his white coat amid the debris, and was arrested. He hasn’t been seen since.
Theo Von:
[Note: The United Nations Human Rights Office issued a statement on July 16th, 2025, reporting that at least 1,581 health workers have been killed in Gaza since October 7th, 2023, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health.]
Healthcare workers in America are probably the most respected profession in society. So this was a genuinely risky choice for you to make.
Dr. Aziz Raman:
It was. I actually wrote letters to my kids before I left, because I genuinely didn’t know if I was coming back. I hoped I would, but anything could have happened. Realistically, I don’t think they would want to target an American physician — that would be a PR nightmare. But has it happened before? They killed an American kid from Florida on vacation in the West Bank. There was also the Al Jazeera reporter who was sniped and killed on the spot.
Theo Von:
I think it’s very brave of you to go. Are you sleeping at the hospital?
Dr. Aziz Raman:
Yes. There’s an international doctors’ lounge on the top floor where doctors from different NGOs sleep — whether you’re from America, the UK, or Australia. The men have their own call room and the women have theirs, with a shared common space where the local staff would prepare food for us. There’s a small balcony where we could step out and breathe without patients around. It was a nice space to decompress, and we ate the local food.
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Theo Von:
What were your shifts like?
Dr. Aziz Raman:
It depended on your specialty. As the only interventional radiologist in the area — there were just two in all of Gaza — when I arrived, those other two essentially told everyone at Nasser, “Give him all your cases,” since they only came in about once a week. For the ER doctors we came with, they typically work eight or twelve-hour shifts in America. When they got there, they said, “We’re going to do a 12-hour shift.” The locals just laughed: “No, you’re not. You’ll do a four-hour shift, because you won’t last longer than that.” And they were right. Take the most experienced trauma surgeon in Baltimore — which is one of America’s biggest trauma centers — and put them in Gaza, and it would feel like child’s play by comparison. You’re talking about an influx of 400 patients in four hours: 30 casualties on arrival, 30 headshots on arrival, 30 critical mass injuries — women, children, elderly, men, young boys — everything. How do you triage all of that? And that was every day. It took a serious mental toll.
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Theo Von:
What was the first moment you thought, “Oh my God, this is a lot”?
Dr. Aziz Raman:
The first day, a Friday, was actually relatively calm. But on Saturday they had a mass casualty incident — an MCI — and they pulled a fire alarm. I asked what was happening and was told, “Every doctor come down to the ER to help.” I went downstairs and there was brain matter coming out of people, organs exposed from abdominal wounds, legs blown off — and a family member carrying a detached limb alongside the patient, believing the doctors could reattach it. Absolute chaos. Family members everywhere, security trying to push them out so the medical staff could work. We American physicians just looked at each other in disbelief. I thought it must be a one-off. But it kept happening every day — sometimes multiple times a day. We eventually noticed a pattern: it correlated with the opening of GHF sites. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is an American and Israeli initiative to deliver aid to Gaza, effectively replacing all UN aid agencies. Since around March, GHF has been the only organization allowed to bring aid into Gaza.
Theo Von:
We’ve been hearing a lot about this in the news — long lines for aid and food, reports of mass starvation and famine being used as a tool of war. What did you see?
Dr. Aziz Raman:
We were hearing testimony from everyone coming in that the GHF sites were a death trap. And there’s a psychological dimension to this. In Islam, suicide is forbidden. But in a situation where almost everyone is depressed — some having lost everything, their families, their children — some people almost want to die. So they go to GHF sites half-hoping they’ll be killed. The statistics bear this out: we were seeing around 100 deaths a day and 300 injuries a day, consistently, for the entire two weeks we were there.
Theo Von:
[Note: According to one report, at least 325 people in Gaza were killed by Israeli forces while trying to reach food in a single week, including 24 on one Saturday and 14 on the following Sunday. This occurred despite Israeli assurances of a humanitarian pause in attacks to allow more aid in, as deaths from malnutrition were soaring.]
So some people were essentially putting themselves in harm’s way at humanitarian aid sites because their faith prohibits them from taking their own lives directly?
Dr. Aziz Raman:
I didn’t personally witness that, but I’m in contact with many of the medical students, nurses, and physicians there now. Just this past week, one told me: “If my wife and child die, I’m going to a GHF site and I hope I’m taken.” It’s real. The psychology is haunting. We were at a table with one of our medical students doing rounds — discussing cases and patients — when she said, “My uncle and 20 family members were just drone-struck about an hour ago.” Not a single tear, not a single change in her expression. How do you even respond to that? In America, you’d tell a medical student to take a week or a month off. She took three hours off to attend the funeral the following day, and then came back. That was it.
She was 22 years old, a medical student working there every day.
Theo Von:
There is a medical school there?
Dr. Aziz Raman:
Yes. The medical students are full-fledged students — they come every day and are some of the hardest-working people there. They have board exams. There’s residency. It’s extraordinary. There are two medical schools in Gaza — the Islamic University of Gaza and Al-Azhar University of Gaza — both of which have been destroyed. The students have all had to take a year off, yet they’re still showing up at the hospital.
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Theo Von:
You hear a lot about the aid situation in the media — it’s their fault, it’s the UN’s fault, Hamas is stealing the food. What is the real picture? Is Hamas stealing it?
Dr. Aziz Raman:
The GHF is essentially taking over aid delivery, and virtually no one wants to work with them — not other countries, not the UN. The UN has food ready in warehouses on trucks in Egypt and Jordan, but it’s not being allowed in because Israel has only authorized GHF to operate. GHF is run by private military contractors. That’s militarized aid, which is against international law. I’m not a lawyer, but you can look at the Geneva Convention and the Rome Statutes — it’s clear. The UN doesn’t want to be implicated in violations of its own principles.
Theo Von:
[Note: The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is run by a combination of American security contractors, ex-military officers, and humanitarian aid officials. The organization operates with the support of the US and Israeli governments but is primarily managed by American individuals. GHF has faced significant criticism from international aid groups and the UN, who argue that it lacks transparency, independence, and adherence to established humanitarian norms.]
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What about the issue of starvation itself — what were you seeing?
Dr. Aziz Raman:
I lost 15 pounds during those two weeks. Every one of the six physicians lost significant weight. I have a smart scale at home, and the graph after Gaza just drops sharply — which was nice for me, since I came back slimmer. But for the people there, it’s indefinite. They’ve been experiencing this for months. They have vitamin deficiencies. They lack energy. They have anemia from insufficient iron and protein. Women can’t breastfeed. They deliver babies and have no milk — and there’s no formula coming in. Formula has been confiscated from doctors trying to bring it in. Every aspect of their health is affected. Even if someone doesn’t look skeletal, if you ran their labs, they would be seriously ill. Starvation has stages — you don’t go from healthy to skin and bones overnight. Some people’s abdomens actually bloat due to protein loss, as fluid shifts from the blood vessels into the abdominal cavity. We visited the neonatal ICU in the pediatric hospital and saw babies who were truly skin and bones. Knowing that what they need is simply formula — that was devastating.
Theo Von:
And the Hamas-controlling-the-food question — what did you actually hear on the ground?
Dr. Aziz Raman:
I went as a doctor, but I asked everyone I could — not patients, but colleagues and coworkers. Everyone said the same thing: “There’s no way.” To reach a GHF site, you have to enter an active war zone, with tanks, private military personnel, and the Israeli military present. It doesn’t make logical sense. And even if Hamas were somehow taking food, the obvious solution would be to flood Gaza with aid — if you overwhelm the supply, Hamas would have zero leverage over food. If they’re allegedly stealing and selling it, make it so abundant that it loses all value. That’s just common sense. But I saw no evidence of Hamas controlling food. Anthony Aguilar confirmed that aid seekers weren’t even being screened to determine if they were Hamas. There’s no vetting process whatsoever.
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Theo Von:
What types of injuries were you seeing come in?
Dr. Aziz Raman:
There were a couple of clear patterns. First, gunshot wounds — and they were very precise, almost exclusively targeting the head and neck, or critical mass areas. Occasionally an abdominal wound. Then explosion injuries: burn injuries and shrapnel projectiles. Rarely, you’d see something local like a trampling or an internal altercation, but those were extremely uncommon. When groups of patients arrived, they often came by donkey — that was their ambulance. Some ambulances exist, but most people arrived by donkey cart or carried by family members who would rush in and lay the patient down wherever there was space. An arm destroyed by an explosion, a baby with 85% burns — no chance of survival — a man with a gunshot wound to the head. I’m not exaggerating, and I have photographs to prove it, though some may be too graphic for a general audience.
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Theo Von:
What was the process like when patients arrived? Was there any kind of security or organization at the entrance?
Dr. Aziz Raman:
The hospital was completely overrun — one person at the door trying to let doctors through to the trauma bay while holding back a sea of people. Kids wandering through looking for clean drinking water while you’re consulting with a neurosurgeon about a patient. The locals would gently shoo them away. Patients’ families slept outside the ICU; the hallways were packed — not a single empty space along the walls. People feel safe in the hospital because it’s not being bombed.
Theo Von:
How do you triage when someone arrives?
Dr. Aziz Raman:
When a patient enters the ER, they’re assigned to a green, yellow, or red zone depending on severity. Green is minor injuries, yellow is intermediate, red is critical. Then there’s the black zone — that’s for anyone who isn’t going to survive. You move them from the red zone to the black zone and tell the family there’s nothing more that can be done. We were doing that often.
Resource management is another issue we haven’t touched on. In America we have ventilators. In the ER there, ventilators were so scarce that if there was a 70-year-old and a 20-year-old both requiring one, we had to decide who gets it. In some instances we had to say the 20-year-old has a longer life expectancy, so the 70-year-old goes to the black zone. You tell the family. They don’t like that answer, but what else can you do? Sometimes we even got into arguments with the local doctors, because we’d come from America thinking we could save a patient — but without the resources and medications, it simply wasn’t possible. Food is obviously a massive problem, but medications, surgical supplies, and equipment are also not getting in. We tried to bring supplies in our 50-pound carry-on bags, but what does that accomplish for 2.2 million people? Six doctors trying to save the world — it doesn’t add up.
Theo Von:
Is there enough blood available?
Dr. Aziz Raman:
Sometimes it runs out. Occasionally Israel allows a mass blood donation from the West Bank to come through. We physicians were encouraged to donate blood upon leaving — at the end of our stay, so it wouldn’t leave us too fatigued to work.
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Theo Von:
What were the conditions like at other hospitals, such as Al-Shifa in the north?
Dr. Aziz Raman:
At Al-Shifa, they were sometimes performing procedures by flashlight during power outages, and conducting amputations without sedatives. Nasser Hospital, as the last major tertiary care facility, was receiving the bulk of whatever limited resources existed. Every other hospital in Gaza has essentially been bombed. Do I think Hamas is doing that? No. Absolutely not.
Theo Von:
What did you do with the deceased?
Dr. Aziz Raman:
Once we declared someone dead, it became the family’s responsibility to handle everything. We pronounced them dead, and the family would take the body to the morgue — about 100 meters away. The Ministry of Health would document what happened, and the body would be prayed over and buried the same day, usually within an hour or two. But it was an assembly line: patient comes in, ER, dead, morgue, prayer, funeral. Constant, all day long. You’d look out the window and that’s all you’d see.
I visited the morgue one day. There were 15 bodies lined up, some of them children — almost all with head wounds. That particular group was from a GHF site. I was disgusted. I took a video — I’ve never experienced anything like it. I deliberately went there during that time because I wanted to feel what the locals feel. I’m in the hospital, in the ER — I needed to actually experience what these people go through. You hear the wailing of women when they learn their loved one has died. There’s a gazebo at Nasser Hospital where they place bodies that haven’t yet been identified. You’d see family members going in, looking at ten bodies, unzipping the bags, looking at faces — if there was still a face to recognize — and then you’d hear a shriek.
Declaring a patient dead is one thing. Witnessing the family’s grief, seeing them pray over their loved one — that’s another entirely. I’m a doctor, I’m trained to compartmentalize. But I almost had to give myself permission to go there and cry, because there’s no space to cry in the hospital. None of the local doctors cry — they’re too focused on the next patient. They don’t have time. So that’s why I wanted to go: I wanted to let myself feel it.
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Theo Von:
There are times when I’m saying my own prayers and I feel guilty that I can do so in safety, knowing someone there is praying and wondering if anything will hear those prayers. What was the atmosphere like — was there any gratitude from the people there?
Dr. Aziz Raman:
Incredibly so. There were moments — one of the most striking — when we declared a patient dead and the family member turned to us and asked, “Are you guys from America?” We said yes. And he said, “Thank you so much for coming here. You’re risking your safety, your time, your families to take care of us. We’re truly honored.” His relative had just died, and he was thanking us. That gratitude we experienced throughout our time there was profound. And we didn’t go looking for feel-good moments like that.
Before leaving, I asked many people, “What do you want me to do?” The answer, almost universally, was: “Don’t stop talking. Speak about us as much as you can.” And perhaps the most humbling request was this: tell people we are human. That was their modest ask of the world.
Theo Von:
Are there any particular moments that really stand out — things that captured the intensity of conflict and violence there?
Dr. Aziz Raman:
One story that really sticks with me: a 30-year-old pregnant woman, 15 weeks along, came in with trauma and a dropping blood pressure. She clearly had internal bleeding. We checked for fetal heart tones — there were none. We took her emergently to the operating room, opened the uterus, and found that a bullet had passed through the uterus and through the neck of the fetus. I don’t think a human being is meant to see that. You see fetal deaths from various medical causes, but not like this — an exploded fetus with blood coming from the neck. It was probably the most horrific thing I’ve ever seen. And the fact that she went from expecting a baby in a few months to never being able to have a child again — they had to remove her uterus — that was one of the most tragic things I’ve witnessed. Especially in Gaza, where one of the greatest honors is to have children and continue the next generation.
But then there was Amir — a 15-year-old who came in with a blood pressure of nearly zero. An ultrasound showed blood around his heart, preventing it from beating. We inserted a tube emergently to relieve the pressure, and his blood pressure shot back up. He was still unconscious. Two days later, the doctor caring for him brought him to me and asked, “Do you know who this is?” I had no idea — I’d never seen his face. The doctor asked the kid to lift his shirt, and I saw the scar from where I’d placed the tube. He was smiling the most beautiful smile, and he was being discharged in two days. If I had gone to Gaza and come back with only that one story, I would have come back a happy man. That’s what being a doctor is all about.
But there was also a one-year-old with 85% burns from an explosion — essentially guaranteed death. The team tried to establish IV access but couldn’t, and had to declare the baby dead. Then they had to tell the mother. She collapsed. We had to care for the mother next. And then I saw the father — carrying his one-year-old wrapped in foil to the morgue, minutes after the pronouncement. I thought: could I be that strong? These Gazans have become so accustomed to death. And I truly believe it’s their faith that sustains them. They don’t feel like the world is listening. And that, more than anything, is heartbreaking.
Theo Von:
What were conditions like for children in the hospital?
Dr. Aziz Raman:
There was a pediatric hospital next to Nasser, but all pediatric trauma still came to Nasser. The child trauma cases were different — so difficult to see, to process, to treat, and to discuss with families. You’re seeing children as young as one, sometimes infants. I asked one girl — through a translator, as I don’t speak Arabic — what had happened to her. She said, “I was sitting in my tent reading the Quran, and a quadcopter drone shot through the tent, and here I am.” The trajectory of the bullet — top to bottom — was unusual. People normally get shot forward to back. Someone getting shot from above while sitting in a tent in a civilian safe zone is very difficult to explain otherwise. We heard of civilians, girls and boys, being shot by quadcopters almost every day.
Theo Von:
What exactly is a quadcopter?
Dr. Aziz Raman:
Essentially a drone engineered to carry and fire a mounted assault rifle, remotely activated. We were told that if you see one, you’re likely to be shot. I never saw one myself — I stayed inside the hospital — but you could hear drones constantly. Twenty-four hours a day, there was drone buzzing overhead. They apparently track everyone’s face, and likely everyone’s phone is being monitored through Israeli cellular towers. They know where everyone is.
Theo Von:
What about Hamas — did you see or treat any Hamas fighters? What did the local population say about them?
Dr. Aziz Raman:
I did not see any combatants. We have no way of knowing who is or isn’t a combatant. I did not treat anyone I knew to be Hamas. I asked local people what they thought of Hamas, and the opinions were genuinely varied — some supported them, some didn’t. They are a political entity in Gaza; they were democratically elected in the 2000s. Just as in America where you have different political factions, over there Hamas is one such faction. In America they’re designated a terrorist organization, but locally the perception is different.
As for combatants coming to the hospital — I don’t think they would. They know the drones are watching, and I don’t think they’d risk having the hospital bombed on account of their presence. Though granted, Israel has already bombed other hospitals.
Theo Von:
What do you think is happening with the famine? Is it intentional?
Dr. Aziz Raman:
I believe it’s an intentional, systemic collapse of the healthcare and food systems. This famine isn’t random — it was engineered. Starvation takes months. Your body doesn’t collapse overnight; it takes three or four months to deplete your caloric reserves, exhaust the glycogen stored in your liver, then begin consuming muscle, then bone. What we’re seeing now is the late-stage starvation of the first wave of people who were cut off from food months ago. It will only get exponentially worse unless reversed immediately. And even if reversed, you can’t simply feed a starving person a steak and expect recovery. Refeeding syndrome is a serious medical complication — you need specialized nutritionists alongside doctors and aid. We may be at a point of no return. Unless things change immediately, I am genuinely scared of what comes next.
Theo Von:
What are people actually eating right now?
Dr. Aziz Raman:
They’re getting flour, and they grow some produce domestically — zucchini, tomatoes, peppers. From outside, flour and sugar come in, but they’re extremely expensive. They used to have rice; now it’s essentially flour, beans, and chickpeas. There are markets — tent markets — but inflation is severe. Tomatoes have gone up something like 3,000% in the last few months. A 20-kilogram bag of flour — which lasts a normal family about two weeks — costs around $500 US dollars. That’s simply not affordable for most people. That’s why they go to the GHF sites. It’s not about ideology. It’s about survival.
Theo Von:
Who is selling food at those prices?
Dr. Aziz Raman:
It’s criminal gangs inside Gaza — a separate issue entirely, not Hamas.
Theo Von:
What do you think are the long-term effects of this trauma on the people of Gaza?
Dr. Aziz Raman:
It’s going to be generational. Children are seeing their fathers’ brains splattered. It’s hard for me as a physician to witness that in the ER. Imagine being a child and watching a family member die in front of you. Every child there will carry trauma they may never get over. I don’t think there’s any psychiatrist in the world equipped to treat what these people have experienced. It’s like the Holocaust — what happened there was so devastating that we’re still talking about it generations later. This will be the same, in my view.
And beyond the psychological damage, the physical long-term effects are also frightening. People are burning furniture for firewood, with no electricity. The toxic fumes are serious. We’re going to see cancers develop in 15 years from what they’re being exposed to now. I fear for what the next generation will face.
Theo Von:
Is there any hope? Do the people there feel like they still have hope?
Dr. Aziz Raman:
Many people want to leave — especially those with children, who just want the best opportunities for their kids. Many students want to study abroad in the UK or Qatar, and that’s their way out. But there’s also a large segment that says, “We are not leaving our homeland, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
Gazans are probably the most resilient people you’ll ever meet — in the best way. They don’t give up. You go there and they’re smiling, and you wouldn’t even know they’re living through a genocide until you start talking to them. I went there as a proceduralist, as a doctor. But what I realized was that I was just another person — a brother — putting my hand on someone’s shoulder and saying, “Talk to me. Tell me what’s going on.” It took a few days to build that trust, but once we did, people opened up.
There was a doctor who was jailed for two months — no charges, then released and told to return to his normal life. There was a surgeon jailed for a year — no charges. They told me about being blindfolded and zip-tied, 200 people in one space, not allowed to speak to one another, beaten if they did. Skin diseases from the conditions. No communication with family. I cannot understand how we normalize that — arresting innocent physicians, nurses, healthcare workers — and accept it as human beings.
Theo Von:
[Note: According to the head of information for the Hamas-led Gaza Health Ministry, over 365 healthcare workers were being held in Israeli prisons as of early 2025.]
Dr. Aziz Raman:
I met two of the released doctors — they live in a tent now.
In Khan Younis there’s a tent city — the Mawasi Camp. One-third of Gaza lives there. You literally find a plot of land, put your tent down, and 20 family members share the space. You see kids playing on trampolines. Fathers sitting, trying to figure out what to do. Mothers in their tents caring for little ones. Grandparents gathered together. It looks, in many ways, like an attempt at normal life. These are normal civilians, just living.
Everyone cooks with firewood — there’s no electricity. They burn old furniture. The toxic fumes are unreal. These people are going to have chronic diseases for the rest of their lives.
I visited a larger tent being used as a school. All the children were inside, singing. I asked the principal if I could record. When I told him I was from the US, he said, “Please record it and share it with people.” That’s what they want — for people to see they are human. I started recording and then abruptly stopped, because I couldn’t handle it. You see the same children being destroyed in the trauma bay, and you realize those are the people being bombed. Sixty thousand dead, 50% of them women and children. And here they are — just singing. Just kids. Normal human beings who look different, speak a different language, and somehow have become the targets.
Theo Von:
Would you go back?
Dr. Aziz Raman:
Absolutely. There was a positive effect — the camaraderie, the medical friendships, the gratitude of colleagues who were simply glad to see us there. I keep in touch with them every day. I want to go back.
The final conversation I want to leave people with is this: the people of Gaza are not asking you and me to get rid of the bombs, the drones, or the tanks. They’re not expecting us to save the day. They just want a voice. They want us to tell others that these people are human. That they’re not all Hamas. That they deserve to live, to be educated, to smile, to see their children grow up. At the end of the day, it’s about humanism.
I know that sounds like a cliché. But when I went to Gaza, I felt it with true conviction. There was no financial payment, no insurance, no conflict of interest. It was pure patient care. And it was the most beautiful thing I have ever experienced. Of perhaps 2 billion people on earth, only about 500 doctors have been there in the last two years. I was one of them. And I felt genuinely blessed.
If you talk to all 500 of those doctors, they will tell you the same thing: children are being blown up, women are being shot, fathers are being killed. There is famine. There is starvation. Mothers cannot breastfeed. There is no formula, no food. Talk to the doctors who have been there in the last three months, and they will all say the same thing.
I’m very grateful that people like you are talking about it. That’s all the people of Gaza are asking for.
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Theo Von:
Dr. Raman, thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate it.
Dr. Aziz Raman:
Thank you for having me and for the courage to discuss this. It’s not easy to hear that brains are coming out of people’s heads on a routine basis. But it is what it is. We saw it, and I want to share it. I apologize to the audience if any of this was too difficult — but it is the reality.