Interviewer:
Joining me on set is Dr. Mohammed Tahir. He’s the head of medical evacuation and chief of surgery at Faser Global — a nonprofit organization delivering medical and humanitarian services in crisis zones. Thank you very much indeed for being with us. You heard Hani there saying roughly 20,000 people in need of medical care. It’s going to take, at the rate that the Israelis have set in terms of transferring people through, about three years for those people to get that help. Talk to us about how important the opening of the crossing is.

Dr. Mohammed Tahir:
First of all, thank you for having me. The Rafah crossing opening again is definitely a lifeline for the people of Gaza in many ways. In the context of medical evacuation, there are, as you said, tens of thousands of critically injured people who create a huge healthcare burden on the existing infrastructure in Gaza, which is already depleted. I’ll give you an example. We’re engaged in evacuation and a lot of these patients are poly-trauma patients — they got multiple injuries. They’re covered in sediments of thick debris and dirt from living in terrible conditions in tents and so on. They have multi-drug-resistant bacteria in their soft tissues, in their bones, and they have been neglected — not through will, but by the conditions forced upon our colleagues in Gaza. Three years of an injury — there’s just no way of managing these conditions. These are time-critical injuries. From July 2024 to November 2025, there were over 1,000 patients that died waiting for evacuation. 150 doesn’t even scratch the surface. This is a token — no more than that. It’s just something that the Israelis can say, “Oh, we fulfilled this checklist.” But in terms of actually bringing benefit to the people, this is nothing.

Interviewer:
There’s a lot of speculation that this will lead to crowds of people moving towards Rafah in the hope that they’re going to be able to get through the crossing at some point. They still, as Hani was describing, don’t have any guarantees that they would actually be allowed to return. They may not qualify for return. You’ve been working with so many people like that over the years. Can you give us a sense of how those people might be feeling with the opening of the crossing now?

Dr. Mohammed Tahir:
Caught between a rock and a hard place. Imagine you are the father or the mother of an injured person and you want the best for your child. You want them to receive the best level of care because you know otherwise this child will be bedridden or will suffer from long-term infections and will have a miserable life. And you’re faced with that option of leaving to seek treatment for your child — and this has happened, I know and I’ve experienced this — versus leaving your family behind and knowing that you may never see them again, or may never smell the scent of your city. It’s terrible, and it’s such a difficult position. It’s such a crime that they are forced into these positions, but they are a people with no choice. Ultimately these families need to make very difficult decisions. I know that for a lot of family members, their short-term thinking is: let me get my family member in the best possible situation. By the way, a lot of family members that leave with these injured children are grandmothers or aunts, because their parents have been killed. I have several double-orphaned children with severe injuries and only a grandmother to look after them. It’s really a terrible situation because then that grandmother has to leave behind her other remaining children.

Interviewer:
It’s so difficult. They carry so many ethical and moral burdens. In terms of the kind of decisions that people are having to make — given the timescales we’re talking about and the chance that they may not even get through the crossing in the first place — do you think people might actually decide just to stay where they are, despite suffering from terrible afflictions that can’t be treated with the medical facilities that are left in Gaza?

Dr. Mohammed Tahir:
That’s absolutely correct, and I have experience of this. You’re limited in the number of persons you can take with you for medical evacuation. And some people, when left with that choice, say: “No, we’ll stay and we’ll suffer instead.” Some people have said: “We are firmly planted in this earth. This is the land of our fathers and our forefathers, and we gave blood and we sacrificed to stay on this land. We will not be part of a forced displacement.” Of course, these people that leave have no guarantee they’ll come back. In Egypt, for example, at the Rafah crossing, there’s no current infrastructure to transport these patients to other Arab nations. For Palestinians, travel between nations is extremely difficult — a lot of them don’t even have passports. So if they end up in healthcare systems in Egypt, which have already received tens of thousands and are already overstretched, there are many cases in Egypt which are neglected. I don’t see this as a permanent or comprehensive solution to what is a very complex scenario. I’m still shocked that at this point in time there hasn’t been a unifying body which has sat down and said: “Okay, this is how we’re going to address this issue — we’ll move them to Egypt, we’ll treat them in private facilities to take the burden off local healthcare systems, we’ll create infrastructure for them to travel to other places.” It hasn’t happened. I really do feel for the people there — they are in such a difficult position — but we will stand by them until the very end.

Interviewer:
We really appreciate you coming to join us at Al Jazeera and giving us the benefit of your expertise,

Dr. Mohammed Tahir. Thank you very much indeed.

Dr. Mohammed Tahir: Thank you.