After spending two weeks in southern Gaza on a humanitarian mission, Dr. Nimr Ikram speaks to TRT World about the 'unfathomable' things he witnessed and his hope for a brighter future for the Palestinian people.
After spending two weeks in southern Gaza on a humanitarian mission, Dr. Nimr Ikram speaks to TRT World about the "unfathomable" things he witnessed and his hope for a brighter future for the Palestinian people.Nimr Ikram, a Texas-based orthopaedic surgeon, recently spent two weeks in Gaza, providing medical aid to those in need.
But then we got to the checkpoint, got past the checkpoint, and started walking through and even then you saw hundreds more trucks just waiting on the side to be allowed to enter. Certainly there were perishable things in there, someone said that they saw a truck just full of eggs. And that didn't survive for that long so unfortunately, there's perishable and non-perishable items that are there that's just being wasted sitting there.
Yeah, they say it's an active war zone. They're not ultimately responsible, you have to know there's a chance that you may get injured. But whenever we're travelling, we're supposed to contact someone . It's on the border of Khan Younis and Rafah, so people are still coming there, even though they were kind of pushed south. They're still going to that hospital.
TRT World: Most people tend to go away from conflict zones, and you kind of went into one. So can you talk a little bit about your rationale? What were you thinking going in? Why did you go?: From my standpoint, and the things that I teach my kids is that we're always being tested. As a physician, we're well set, no major test and tribulation that we have. You see these people over in Gaza, and Africa, all these places, they don't have food, they don't have anything.
The father was saying,"This is my only daughter, save her." Of course they asked what happened? And he said we were told that Israeli forces were pulling back. So we wanted to see if there's anything left over at our house, if there was anything else to go back to, so we started going back to our house, and there were who he assumed were snipers waiting for them.
TRT World: So as an orthopaedic surgeon you deal with broken bones right? With so few doctors, and so few medical resources, what's awaiting people who had amputations, because there's not much aftercare?Things that can't be salvaged, we can amputate them. But we try to save as much as we can. Actually, those patients are probably a little better off than the patients whom we do what's called an external fixator.
: So there were a couple. One is that one day, a five-year-old child was brought into the clinic by a man. And he had fallen, he had hurt his arm, he had hurt himself. I have four kids, so we just assumed it was his father, his brother. And we asked, so like,"Oh, what's your relationship to him?" They don't have anything that they can give, obviously. There's no gifts that they can give or anything of that sort. So what they do is they either get seashells because it's right on the beach, or they get rocks. And so what they'll give you as a gift — they give you either one of those and usually they write on it,"from Gaza with love, despite the pain."
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