CHICAGO (NewsNation) — Two American doctors who recently returned from Gaza, where they saw firsthand the carnage that came out of the ongoing war there, agree the U.S. is directly contributing to what they say is genocide taking place as the Middle East conflict approaches its one-year anniversary in October.
Nabeel Rana, a vascular surgeon from North Carolina, and Ahmad Yousaf, an internal medicine pediatrician from Arkansas, told NewsNation on Tuesday that for all of their medical experience, nothing could have prepared them for what they saw daily working at a hospital in central Gaza.
Both physicians are attending this week’s Democratic National Convention as witnesses of the violence that has led to the deaths of 40,000 Palestinians. Yet while much has been made of U.S. efforts to bring a cease-fire in the war, they say that as long as the U.S. continues to contribute the way it has since October, the true story isn’t being told.
“There’s no debate that there is a genocide — absolute annihilation of peoples and a land — happening right now, and we’re directly involved in that,” Rana told NewsNation. “We’re directly contributing to it. So, it’s not about going in and negotiating a cease-fire and acting like peacekeepers. We’re the actual culprits. This is on our hands. We’re the ones who are doing it.”
Rana said he is ashamed as an American, and that the U.S. is exhibiting hypocrisy in messaging related to what is happening in Gaza. The war is the main focus of pro-Palestinian protesters who are marching this week in Chicago, calling for an end to U.S. aid to Israel.
Yousaf tells NewsNation he regularly saw triage situations that would overwhelm any American health care system. He said that once arriving in Gaza, he quickly learned that his medical expertise would be useless because of the lack of supplies available to doctors working there and because no humanitarian aid was being allowed.
Each day, he said, medical professionals were forced to make choices about who received blood and other supplies because there was simply not enough to go around.
‘People were going to die no matter what doctors did,” Yousaf told NewsNation on Tuesday, adding, “The vast consensus was that what we were seeing was genocide.”
Both doctors agreed that Palestinian people aren’t receiving the care they deserve and that despite narratives being shared by news organizations in the U.S., the stories can’t compare to what is actually happening. Both said that patients they treated in Gaza simply asked for their stories to be told.
“What I saw when I was there was the best of humanity,” Yousaf said. “I saw human dignity in a way I’ll never forget because I felt it.”
Rana agreed but said that as much kindness was shown to him by those he treated, he knew the best thing he could do was to convey this week what he saw.
“To say that we were providing aid or relief is a really an overstatement,” Rana told NewsNation. “And for Israeli governments to say they’re allowing aid and relief to enter is really a fallacy.”
He added: “Were we providing good care? No. It was just damage control, and that’s the best they could do, and that’s what we basically had to contribute to the best we could.”
