BBC:
Joining us now Tanya Haj Hassan who is a pediatric doctor from Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF; Doctors without Borders). She was in Gaza just over a months ago and she joins us now from Jordan.
Tanya Haj Hassan thank you for joining us here on BBC News. I understand that you know the doctor who accompanied Dr. al-Najjar to identify her children who had died in this attack. What are you hearing via the doctor?
Tanya Haj Hasan:
Thank you. Just to clarify I was in Gaza with the charity Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP), although I also do work for MSF. So, Doctor Alaa worked in the emergency department of Al Nassar hospital, or works in the emergency department of Al Nassar hospital. She was on call the day that her children were killed, yesterday. She was taken to the hospital by her husband, who is also a physician, to work in the pediatric emergency department. Her husband went home, and my understanding from her colleagues, my colleagues in the building where we all worked, including Doctor Alaa, is that as soon as her husband got home to be with the children while his wife was at work, on-call in the emergency department, the home was struck. Dr. Alaa received word that her children’s bodies were brought to the hospital, so she went down with my colleague to identify the bodies. And my colleague and friend, an intensive care doctor, who was with Doctor Alaa, told me that she couldn’t look at the bodies, that they were charred and disfigured, and dismembered beyond recognition. And Dr. Alaa’s colleagues who went with her, were all in tears. My colleague said she needed to faint. She was passing out just from the image of her friend and colleague’s children in front of her. So those were seven children. Two more children were subsequently retrieved from the remnants of the home, again charred beyond recognition. And then her sole surviving child had to undergo surgery, emergency surgery in the hospital, as Doctor Graham just mentioned in the clip before me. Her husband is in a critical condition in the intensive care unit. And I just want to say, you know, this isn’t new. This is part of a pattern of targeting civilians, of targeting healthcare workers. Over 1400 health care workers have been killed to date, and that’s just referring to the health workers themselves, not all the healthcare worker families that have been killed. Every single colleague I worked with in Gaza both this year and last year, had multiple first and secondhand relatives, first- and second-degree relatives who had been killed to date. I have a health worker colleague who recently lost the majority of his family, a year ago, and recently while I was in Gaza, received a phone call to say that his father and brother were also killed minutes prior, and his sister is paralyzed from the neck down. This means that his entire family for the most part is either killed or debilitatingly injured. And what do we tell these people? What do we tell these people about why we’re not putting a stop to every single red line that had been crossed, that has been crossed to date? And, you know, this is a systematic pattern. There’s a group of renowned documentary makers, who made a documentary commissioned by the BBC, on attacks on healthcare, called Medics Under Fire. The production’s been delayed several months, and I would really like to urge the BBC to push for its release as soon as possible. This needs to be documented. This needs to be made public. People need to understand that civilians, their families, healthcare workers are being intentionally and deliberately killed.
BBC:
Dr. Hasan, I just want to say I’m not, I’m not privy to the reasons why that documentary hasn’t been released, as you say. Let me just repeat what you probably heard me say, that the IDF have said in their statement regarding this attack in Khan Yunis. They said that the IDF evacuated civilians from this area for their own safety, and they are now reviewing the claim, as they put it, regarding harm to uninvolved civilians.
You’ve been a pediatrician for a long time.
Tanya Haj Hasan:
Yes.
BBC:
How would you characterize, if you can, and I can hear the distress in your voice, how would you characterize what you’re seeing in Gaza when you go there to work?
Tanya Haj Hasan:
So first of all, in response to that report, or that supposed justification. We’ve been hearing these for 19 months, and half of the time they’re lies and they are subsequently debunked. We know they are lies. And the rest of the time, frankly, they’re just preposterous. Every, 35 of 36 hospitals in Gaza have been targeted. The hospital I was working in, the same hospital that Dr. Alaa was working in, was hit with a drone strike while I was there. Just the floor above me, killing two patients and injuring several others. It has been hit twice since then, so twice since March 23rd, that same hospital has been hit. My colleague, who I just mentioned to you, from the pediatric intensive care unit, called me and left me messages in tears telling me that the ICU is full. In fact, I can read her message to you. She says, “The terror is all night and all day, continuous fear”. She herself lost half of her family, her sister and her entire sister’s family recently. She says, “We miss our loved ones and don’t even know how to grieve for them. We don’t have time to grieve. The pediatric ICU was full; we had to open an extension. It breaks your heart. What is their crime? All these small children, it’s beyond imagination.” And that was the reality for me while I was there. I had an intensive care unit that was filled with maimed children, orphan children, children who were the sole survivors of their family, children who’d lost every single sibling, and whose parents weren’t able to come visit them because they themselves were injured in the adjacent building. This was my experience this year. This was my experience last year. So, to hear even airtime being given to these preposterous justifications by the Israeli spokespeople, when every single credible human rights organization, every single credible humanitarian organization, is coming on delivering the same consistent message, saying this is consistent with genocide, saying that these are crimes against humanity, saying that civilian and humanitarian infrastructure is repeatedly and systematically targeted. I just don’t even understand why we’re giving these, these claims airtime anymore instead of focusing on credible organizations who are bravely…
BBC:
Dr. Hasan, we certainly do that. We certainly do that and indeed, in the last week we’ve also been reporting on how allies of Israel, namely France, Canada, and the United Kingdom, have been extremely critical of Israel’s renewed military operation in Gaza. But you will understand why we have to reflect what the IDF says when we go to them for a statement.
Just finally and briefly if you can, and I know it’s a huge question, but, what’s the most pressing thing Gaza needs in medical terms?
Tanya Haj Hasan:
An end to the bombing. I mean, I know, I know there’s a big push to get humanitarian aid in, and I would agree very strongly with that push, but you have an entire population that is experiencing terror on a second-to-second basis, while they are concurrently being starved. So, you need, frankly an entire peacekeeping force to be on the ground at the moment, ensuring that Palestinians in Gaza are protected and that they are receiving the aid that they need. That needs to be the first absolute step, and then all the subsequent steps of rebuilding, and of course accountability for all of these crimes, including the complicity of countries, of institutions, of individual politicians who have been allowing this to continue for 19 months when we’ve experienced genocides of the past and we’ve avowed as a people to say we’re not going to allow these things to happen again. And yet, we’ve allowed them to happen for 19 consecutive months now.
BBC:
Well, it’s incumbent upon me of course to say that the Israeli government continues to state that genocide acts are not taking place in Gaza.
Tanya Haj Hasan:
You don’t ask the perpetrator of genocide…
BBC:
We have to ask the Israeli government; Dr. Hasan we have to ask the Israeli government for their response to these things, and that is, as you know; (Dr. Hasan attempts to speak) sorry to talk across you, but as you know the that is the response they give and that is what we are …
Tanya Haj Hasan:
I would appreciate it if, if you also in addition to that response, mentioned that Amnesty International, Doctors without Borders, Human Rights Watch, the International Court of Justice, would all beg to differ.
BBC: And also we have reported as well only in March, we reported on a number of instances whereby UN officials, including the Special Rapporteur to Gaza, have described genocidal acts are taking place, and we have reported that.
Tanya Haj Hasan, thank you so much for joining us from Jordan.