Heather McFersonen
Hello everyone. Thank you very much for being here today. I am here. My name is Heather McFersonen. I’m the member of parliament for Edmonton Strathcona and the foreign affairs critic for the New Democratic Party. I’m here to stand in solidarity with Canadian healthcare workers who are here to testify about what they have witnessed in Gaza during this genocide. I want to thank Doctors Against Genocide for sharing their time with us today. This is the defining moral issue of our time. As you know, New Democrats have long called on the Canadian government to end its complicity in this genocide. The time for statements is over. Long past time for action. Strong political and moral choices that will put pressure on Netanyahu to end this. We demand an arms embargo, sanctions on Netanyahu and his cabinet, and the immediate recognition of the state of Palestine in order to move forward with a political solution that could save millions of lives and end this horror.
Today, I’m proud to announce that I have reintroduced my motion to recognize the state of Palestine on the order paper. And I’m encouraging my colleagues in the Commons to co-sponsor this motion. No matter what party you are from, now is the time to raise your voice. Now is the time to put pressure on Prime Minister Mark Carney to do the right thing. Last week, we called for the suspension of CIFTA [Canada-Israel Free Trade Agreement]. Europe and the UK are also considering suspending trade with Israel. Political pressure is the only thing that will end this. For 19 months, we have watched this horror continue. Every day, we see more images and videos of traumatized children and parents, of amputees, of tens of thousands of innocent people killed, forced starvations, bombings, entire families and communities wiped out. The healthcare workers you will hear from now are Canadian heroes who have put their bodies on the line to save the lives of Palestinians in Gaza. I urge you to listen to their voices today and to hear their pain and their appeal to the government as we all confront our collective failure to do everything possible to end this genocide. Thank you.

Maysa Hawwash:
Thank you so much, Heather. I really appreciate your moral clarity and moral courage in this moment that requires all of us to show that same level of courage. Good morning, everyone. My name is Mesa Hawash. I’m a health care professional, a workplace equity and inclusion expert, and one of the founding leaders of Doctors Against Genocide, a global coalition of healthcare workers and advocates who refuse to stay silent as the world witnesses a catastrophic assault on human life, dignity, and the very foundations of medical ethics. We are healthcare workers who took an oath to protect life. An oath that now compels us to speak truth to power. I stand before you as a Palestinian Canadian who knows exactly what it means to live under brutal occupation where occupying forces control your breath, your dreams, your very right to exist. What you see in Gaza today is the logical end point of this decades-long machinery of dehumanization. Hospitals bombed not just to kill patients but to erase healing itself. Schools destroyed not just to end lives but to exterminate futures. The tens of thousands killed are only the visible casualties. The real crime lives on and the children who now see and associate sunlight with drones. Mothers so malnourished they birth generations of already starved babies. Their tiny, deformed bodies by famine weapons, their organs pre-aged by trauma. And now we are witnessing starvation weaponized with surgical precision – walking 15 kilometers through danger zones. This is what it looks like to queue for a single food parcel only to be detained or bombed at the so-called distribution points. (Speaker presents an areal photo) This is a sick theater where Israeli forces starve Palestinians to perform their dehumanization for the world cameras to see while deliberately blocking UN regulated systems that could actually deliver food and feed people. Genocide is a global health emergency of the highest order. It is the catastrophic destruction of every aspect of human, animal, and environmental health. It must be confronted and we are all accountable. Canada’s complicity through arms deals, diplomatic cover and the shameful promotion of weapons expose like CANSEC fuels the machinery of genocide. Today, today we present a prescription in the form of medical orders meant to heal and treat the devastating disease of genocide. (Speaker presents a certificate-like document) We present this prescription to Prime Minister Mark Carney and the newly elected cabinet members and MPs. Mr. Carney, you have the power to shape policies that can reaffirm Canada’s commitment to humanity and morality. You wrote a book about the values of solidarity, fairness, and responsibility. You stood up against threats to Canada’s sovereignty and the unfair tariffs. Now is the time to live up to your stated values and show us real action. The world is watching. Will you be remembered as the statesman who acted to stop genocide or the banker who calculated its cost and profit? And so, our prescription for justice is very simple. End the siege and deliver aid. Enforce a permanent ceasefire. Stop arming apartheid. A two-ways arms embargo with no loopholes. Enforce the genocide convention. Hold Canadians accountable. Investigate and prosecute Canadians serving in IOF for war crimes. Enforce international law. Recognize the state of Palestine and cut ties with illegal settlements and defend our freedoms of expression. The time for empty words is over. Canada must act now. Thank you. Now we’ll hear from our Canadian doctors who have returned from Gaza and then we will open it up for questions and answers. Thank you so much.

Dr. Deirdre Nunan
My name is Deirdre Nunan. I’m an orthopedic surgeon. I returned from Gaza on April the 17th after spending seven weeks working there. It was my fifth time working in Gaza. Although I arrived during the ceasefire, I saw freshly wounded patients every day, injuries consistent with weaponized drones and powerful explosions. When the ceasefire was broken on March 18th, my first patient was a young man, 19 years old, his leg torn from his body at the level of his hip. It is one of the worst limb injuries I have seen in my entire career. But yet, I saw two more patients with almost identical injuries in the four weeks that followed and so many more injuries that were just as devastating. Healthcare workers in Gaza feel particularly vulnerable. More than 1,400 have been killed in the last year and a half. Two of my physician friends were killed in hospitals where they worked. Two more were abducted from hospitals and are still held in Israeli prisons. This spring, I treated a pharmacist who was in his pharmacy when it was bombed by Israeli forces. He must have been holding a pen when he was attacked. The ink had spattered all over his hand. I still don’t know if he lived. I was in Gaza when Nasser Hospital surgical department was attacked in March and when Al-Ahli emergency room was attacked in May, sorry, in April. And we looked at each other and we wondered would our hospital be next? But the staff kept coming to work because they had no other safe place to go. Although they were terrified and they told me that they might be killed without their families or their families might be killed without them. I was home already on May 13th when my hospital, the European Gaza Hospital, was attacked with numerous Israeli air strikes which put the hospital out of service, killed and injured around 60 people. That was a full functioning hospital with patients, families, visitors, doctors, medical students who came every day to study, residents who came to work to treat patients and to continue to study and advance in their exams. As a surgeon, I cannot treat a genocide. As doctors, we cannot stop a famine. So, we demand that the Canadian government take meaningful action to enact a ceasefire, enforce a complete two-way arms embargo, prosecute attacks on healthcare, including investigating Canadians who have served in the international in the Israeli forces for potential involvement in those and other war crimes, to end the siege and deliver aid to Gaza, and to uphold the genocide convention.

Dr. Sarah Lalonde
My name is Dr. Sarah Lalonde. I’m a Montreal-based double certified emergency and family doctor. I worked at the European Gaza Hospital from late January until February 27th of this year. I saw many things that go against our Canadian values. I saw a young boy, Yousef, in this picture here, who loved to play soccer and could sing beautifully, who loved his mother more than anyone else in the world. He was a small boy, even smaller than his age would have predicted. He was a primary school aged child who was shot by a sniper during the ceasefire and had a painful journey in our hospital. He was no fighter. On top of the trauma, on top of that, now he has to deal with starvation. And now he is at risk for dying from starvation. Every human being deserves medical aid in that situation. I have as someone who’s been in settings where children have experienced severe malnutrition and as someone who has seen children die from malnutrition, I have witnessed firsthand the suffering of children who are starving and its impact on children last for their whole life. If we think about Ottawa, if we think of all the children between zero and four here in Ottawa, the number of children who have severe malnutrition requiring urgent treatment in Gaza is much beyond that of all the children from 0 to 5 requiring urgent treatment in Ottawa. Every single one of us has loved a child at some point in our lives. I challenge you and everyone else here in Canada to see the children of Gaza in their children and those of your family and your friends. These children deserve the care, dignity, and support that we have an obligation to provide. We cry that what we’re seeing in Gaza does not fit with our Canadian values. And we cry because as health care professionals because we are unable to stop this despite the fact that we’re from such a powerful country. Right now, as Canadian we have a small window to act and if we don’t it will be a blot on our history. We need to bring medications and food urgently into Gaza. We need to create a real arms embargo, and we need to enforce the genocide convention.

Dr. Rizwan Minhas
Good morning, everyone. My name is Dr. Rizswan Minhas. I worked at the European Gaza Hospital last year. Last year when we were entering Gaza through the Rafah border, my fellow Canadian, Jacob Flickinger, a worker for World Center Aid Kitchen a few minutes ahead of us, was deliberately targeted by Israeli air strikes. Along with him, four other World Center Aid Kitchen people were killed a few miles away from us. I stand here today not for myself but for the voices underneath the rubble. For the children bombed in their beds. For the doctors killed in their scrubs. There is no independent journalism allowed in Gaza at this point. But there are international doctors. We’ve been there. We are the eyewitnesses to this genocide. We are telling the truth. And yes, IDF forces are lying to you. Innocent people are being killed in mass numbers from paramedics to doctors and even children. Gaza currently has the highest amount of child amputees per capita in the world. This never happens. It does not happen unless you deliberately target innocent civilians. To those people like Douglas Murray who mockingly ask, “Have you even been there?” To them I said yes Douglas we have been there not once, multiple times, not for a photo-op or headlines but to save lives, but as doctors we can’t end this genocide. When working in the hospital last year, in the European Gaza hospital, I saw so many kids with burn wounds – very painful. This one child by the name of Samara, I remember 5 years old; third degree burn wounds all the way to her bone. I thought I could cheer her up with the candy and she’s like any other child, half the fun is to open that wrapper. But because of her contractions from a third degree burn, she could not even open the wrapper. Instead of putting smile on her face, she became frustrated. At that time, I realized not only did Israel burn her hands but they burned her smile. This is not a war. This is a genocide – confirmed by Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, the Jewish Voice for Peace, and International Court of Justice. To my fellow Canadian physicians, don’t be silent. 1,500 healthcare workers have been killed. Remember the name Dr. Adnan al-Bursh who was not only killed – he was raped and tortured before he was killed. Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya did not leave the hospital till the end. He’s still a hostage with the Israeli army. And recently, Dr. Alaa al-Najjar, a pediatrician working in Nasser hospital. Nine out of her 10 children were burned alive. Each brought one by one in front of her. She could not even recognize them. To our politicians, please have the courage to say the words, “Israel is committing a genocide. These children who have died at least deserve this justice.” Impose a two-way arms embargo. And let me end with this. There is no moral difference between killing children in chambers or by burning them alive in their sleep. Both are genocide. I understand that both are evil and both demand justice. Thank you.

Dr. Yipeng Ge
My name is Dr. Yipeng Ge. I’m a family doctor and I’ve studied how colonialism affects the health of indigenous peoples in the settler colonial state of Canada and also Palestinians in occupied Palestine. I was in Gaza last year as a medical volunteer in primary care clinics in central Rafah and I witnessed with my own eyes the impacts of forced starvation on the children I care for. This is an entirely preventable famine imposed on the Palestinian people in Gaza by Israel and also its allies who are withholding life-saving food, water, and medical aid to an entire population under illegal occupation and blockade since 2007, which has also included the Israeli policy of limiting food to only meet the minimum amount of calories to avoid malnutrition, effectively putting the entire population of Gaza on a diet. This colonial practice of starvation is not new. Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister, used this tactic to ethnically cleanse and displace the indigenous population and said, in his own words, that they were kept on “ the verge of actual starvation”. Earlier this morning, I was at the protest against CANSEC, which is Canada’s “premier global defense and security trade show”, run by CADSI, the American Association of Defense and Security Industries, a defense industry lobby group whose board of directors include executives from companies that supply the Israeli military. One such company that is attending this conference, this trade show is Gastops with their sole manufacturing facility located in Ottawa. They are the only manufacturer of specific engine sensors that go into the F-35 fighter jets. These are the same fighter jets that are dropping 2,000 lb. bombs on Palestinians in Gaza as we speak. Companies in our own backyards are funding, supplying, and fueling this genocide. This is our problem to solve. This is our complicity that we must end. This is our responsibility to the collective liberation for Palestinians who deserve life, dignity, and freedom from occupation, apartheid, and genocide. Free Palestine.

Dr. Dorotea Gucciardo
My name is Dorotea Gucciardo. I run a Canadian medical organization that sends in medical aid and personnel under the World Health Organization. We are here today to sound the alarm about the collapse of the humanitarian system and Canada’s role in failing to uphold the international laws that it claims to defend. Just yesterday, we witnessed the brutal reality of the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which revealed itself not as a humanitarian effort, but as a militarized spectacle. Starving Palestinians were drawn into an active conflict zone with the promise of food only to be met with armed personnel, gunfire, and chaos. This is not humanitarianism. This is using hunger, fear, and humiliation to dehumanize a population. And the suffering is not accidental. As Dr. Majed Jaber, a Palestinian ER physician in Gaza told me, and I quote, “In Gaza, starvation is not a byproduct of war. It is being used as a weapon. I have treated children reduced to skin and bones, dying not because of rare disease, but because they lacked food, clean water, and basic formula. Canada is legally obligated under the Geneva Conventions to ensure that aid is delivered impartially and that humanitarian access is protected. I urge our leaders, especially Prime Minister Mark Carney, to act in line with the message of his own book published in 2021 called Values: Building a Better World for All. In it, he argues that we must place human dignity and shared moral commitments above markets, politics, and power. If our values mean anything, they must mean something now in Gaza. We therefore call on the government of Canada to reject the militarized aid model, to restore full access to the UN and legitimate humanitarian organizations, to ensure aid is delivered safely, neutrally, and at scale, not through armed contractors, and to withhold Canadian funding from any entity that fails to meet these humanitarian principles. This is not only a test of Canadian policy, it is a test of our values. Thank you. (In response to a question) I have been in Gaza. I am a PhD, not an MD. Thank you.

Section of political discussion between the MP and journalists…..

Question:
I want to thank the medical professionals for sharing their testimonies and I don’t want to ask a question that traumatizes, but I’m wondering if one or two of you could speak about what stays with you. You talked about what you saw on the ground. I’m wondering if you’re still in touch with anyone, if there’s a thought that comes to your head at night, if you’d be comfortable sharing

Dr. Sarah Lalonde
There’s a lot of stories that keep coming back to me as I reflect on my time in Gaza. And I’m in constant communication with the team that I was part of. I called my boss when there was when the hospital was bombed in Gaza. And he was there with a team of nurses. The nurses on the video call looked me in the eye and they said, “We’re starving.” And my boss was there. He was trying to organize the evacuation of the department. As you can imagine, organizing an evacuation where you have very little places to evacuate to is a near impossible project. And he had stayed there to take care of his staff and sent all the other staff home. So that’s one of the stories that really stuck with me most recently in May. I also met another patient who I met in the emergency room. He was extremely sick. one of his family members actually came to the emergency room with him, he was a nurse at another hospital and was in the resuscitation bay with us while we were trying to save the patient. And I was extremely worried that the patient was going to die. When I went to visit him on the ward, I came to understand a little bit more about his life that he had six children. And he said to me, he looked at me in the eye. He said, “Why did they target me? I’m a man. I have a job. I’ve never been involved in politics. I don’t own a gun. Why was I chosen?” and will my story make a difference if it’s heard by the world? And he asked me to tell his story, so I’m sharing it with you now.

Dr. Yipeng Ge
I think like any one of us who have worked in Gaza, you meet and befriend people and you stay in touch. I think about Muhammad. I think about Abdullah. These were the Palestinian ambulance drivers that drove me and my team around as we worked at the clinics, visited European Gaza Hospital to deliver medications and supplies and to be in touch with them. They tell me how they can’t feed their children. When I was there last year, they were sharing their food with us. and to see Palestinian healthcare workers like themselves express this form of dignity and humanity to visitors, to guests on their land. They wish that they could have done more actually. And now I don’t know what to say back to them. I don’t know what to text back because we’re witnessing in real time live streamed their annihilation and extermination of an entire people’s an entire community. So I don’t know what more to say to them. I don’t know what more to say here.