U.S. Doctor Returning From Gaza Describes Unforgettable Carnage
Intercepted
Intercepted Podcast
On his five-week medical mission in Rafah, Dr. Mohammad Subeh recalls treating children whose parents were killed in front of their eyes.

The war in Gaza has been among the deadliest for civilians, including children, of any war in the 21st century. After spending five weeks volunteering and administering at a field hospital in Rafah, Mohammad Subeh, an American doctor, describes what he saw to Intercepted co-hosts Jeremy Scahill and Murtaza Hussain. Subeh spent weeks treating wounded Palestinian children, many of them orphaned by Israeli attacks. He also described treating those who survived the aftermath of “mass casualty incidents” in which dozens of civilians were killed or wounded; many of these attacks appeared deliberately targeted at civilians, Subeh says, rather than “indiscriminate.” As the Strip reels from the consequences of a breakdown of public health infrastructure following the destruction of most Gazan hospitals, Subeh says that ordinary civilians are paying a gruesome price for Israel’s military assault.

[Intercepted theme music.]

Jeremy Scahill: Welcome to Intercepted. I’m Jeremy Scahill.

Murtaza Hussain: And I’m Murtaza Hussain.

JS: Maz, I want to start off the show. We’re going to be talking with a doctor who has just come back from Gaza. We’re going to talk about his experiences in a field hospital in Rafah near Khan Yunis in the north of Rafah, as Israel still threatens a full-scale invasion of Rafah.

But first, Maz, you’ve been doing some reporting and writing about the recent events between Israel and Iran, where the Iranian government launched a counterstrike on Israel in response to the Israeli bombing of the Iranian consulate in Damascus. Talk about these events, and your analysis of where things stand right now.

MH: Since the start of the war in Gaza six or so months ago, there’s always been a fear that the war will expand beyond the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians to include the broader region as well and, most prominently, Iran, and now we’re seeing the first steps towards that. Israel, as you mentioned, they blew up the Iranian consulate in Damascus on April 1, which is a very serious escalation because, from legal purposes, consulate buildings count as a sovereign territory of a state.

So, Iran felt compelled to respond to this attack by similarly attacking Israeli territory; in this case, actually, firing ballistic missiles at Israel, and drones. It seems like the escalation or the response by Iran was calculated not to cause damage. They telegraphed their intentions several days in advance, both publicly and privately. And yet, it still represents the first time any state has fired missiles at Israel since Saddam Hussein did it in the early ’90s. So, I think that the Israelis have now said that they’re planning to respond. The scope and scale of that is not clear.

But, either way, I believe that this war, the shadow war between Iran and Israel — which has really been the subtext of a lot of the current conflict as well, too — is now becoming less of a shadow war and more of an overt conflict, in which I do believe that the Israelis will try to involve the U.S. as much as possible.

JS: It’s also interesting, Maz, that you have what is referred to as this Axis of Resistance against Israel — which involves Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Islamic resistance in Iraq and, of course, the Houthi militias Ansar Allah in Yemen, implementing their blockade — and now, with Iran directly firing missiles, even though it was, as you say, it does appear to have been somewhat of a coordinated strike calculated to have a measured response that would be justifiable in turn.

But what is clear is that, in the case of Yemen, in the case of Hezbollah, in the case of Iran, these countries are asserting that they are no longer going to maintain the status quo, where Israel is allowed to act unilaterally, and a nation state like Iran — or a nation state like Yemen — that they’re just going to stand aside and say, oh, yeah, this, this is fine, it’s just the way things work in a so-called rules-based order governed by the United States. It seems like that era is over.

MH: Yeah, I think that’s correct. And, effectively, Iran has created this network of militias and groups — which are not its proxies, but you could say it patronizes — throughout the region, and effectively encircling Israel in many ways by these groups, such that they don’t have the latitude to operate in the region as they did before. And Israel, ultimately, is a small country — I think Iran is about maybe ten times the size in terms of population — and it can’t defy the will of the entire region, absent a blank check, that it receives from the United States in this case.

So, I think Israel is very much drawing down its accounts at the moment. There’s a bank run on U.S. geopolitical security happening in the region and in context of global events. And it needs to have the confrontation, from its perspective, now, with Hezbollah and Iran and these groups, because the U.S. may not be able to support it in the same way in 10 to 15 years.

So, I think from the Israeli perspective, because they do see the shift in the region, their motivation or their incentive, really, is to have a confrontation now, today, when it’s very likely that they could draw upon U.S. carrier groups in the Mediterranean to help them with Hezbollah, or other U.S. assets to help them strike Iran.

So, I think that the risk of a war, which people have feared for many, many years, a regional war, is very, very high today, and probably the highest it’s ever been.

JS: Maz, before we move to speaking with a doctor who has just returned from Gaza, I wanted to draw people’s attention to a story that our colleague Ryan Grim and myself did this week at The Intercept. The headline of it was leaked: New York Times Gaza Memo Tells Journalists to Avoid the Words Genocide, Ethnic Cleansing, and Occupied Territory. And this was an internal style guide memo that we obtained from within the New York Times newsroom, and it was drafted in the middle of November of last year, and has been updated periodically since then. But, essentially, what it is, is the rule book for reporters that are reporting on Gaza.

It tells journalists to severely restrict the use of the term “genocide” to “only discussion of the legal parameters of genocide.” Similar instructions were given about ethnic cleansing. It also says to steer clear of the phrase “occupied territory,” even though international law, the United Nations have determined that all of these areas of Palestine are considered occupied territory. It also directs reporters not to use the word “Palestine” unless they’re talking about the efforts at the United Nations to establish a Palestinian state. And it also tells journalists not to use the term “refugee camps” to describe areas of Gaza that are being attacked by the Israelis.

And they’re saying, well, while these are technically refugee camps that were settled as a result of Palestinians being expelled from their homes decades ago, they’re not really refugee camps, they’re more like neighborhoods now. So, we shouldn’t refer to them as refugee camps, unless it’s to explain why other voices are referring to them as refugee camps.

And this memo, and the leaking of this memo, comes as the New York Times told staff this week that they had wrapped up an internal investigation into who might have been leaking information to The Intercept. And, of course, we’ve published a number of stories about the controversy that has happened within the New York Times newsroom over the Gaza war. There’s been a rebellion of sorts, or severe disagreements between staffers at the Times about the paper’s coverage of the war in Gaza, about the rules for language that can be used when reporting about Gaza, but also problems with the marquee New York Times story called Screams Without Words that is now considered by many to be the kind of gold standard in proving Israel’s narrative that Hamas engaged in a systematic campaign of rape and other sexual violence during the October 7 attacks. All of that can be found at theintercept.com, the latest story from Ryan Grim and myself.

And, with that, I want to bring on our guest now, who is Dr. Mohammad Subeh. He has just returned last month from a five-week medical mission working with the International Medical Corps in establishing a field hospital in Rafah, Gaza. During his five-week mission, the field hospital saw a dramatic increase in cases; they were seeing up to a thousand patients per day, and performing an average of 40 major surgeries daily.

Dr. Subeh currently practices emergency medicine at El Camino Health and Good Samaritan Hospital in the San Francisco Bay Area. He joins us now from Washington, D.C.

Dr. Subeh, thank you so much for being with us.

Mohammad Subeh: Thank you for having me.

JS: Let’s begin. I know that your family, that you are a descendant of Palestinians forcibly expelled from their homes, and you’re an emergency room doctor in California. You’ve just returned from a medical mission to Rafah. Give us a little bit of your family background and your professional background.

MS: My grandparents lived in a city called al-Lydd in now-occupied Palestine and were forcibly displaced in 1948. They took refuge in a small country of Kuwait, and that’s where I was born. I spent the first six years of my life in Kuwait.

Then, the Persian Gulf War in 1990 happened, where Iraq invaded Kuwait, and that was my first exposure to war. And we tried to ride out the war there for about a couple months, but it got to the point where my father was going to be killed, and so, we had to flee within 24 hours.

And so, we sought refuge in Los Angeles, and that’s where I spent the rest of childhood, my adolescent years, up through high school. I trained at the University of Chicago after completing undergrad and grad school up at Stanford, and now practice emergency medicine in the Bay Area.

JS: And how did you make the decision to travel to Gaza in the midst of this war and siege that Israel has laid on the Palestinians of Gaza?

MS: Ever since I became an emergency physician, even prior to that, my goal was to not only practice medicine locally, where it may be convenient for us physicians to practice medicine, but also globally, [in] communities that really need the help. So, annually I go on medical missions.

So, I take my older son with me to El Salvador, and we go there for almost two weeks every year. And last year when we returned, he and I and my wife were talking about the possibility of going to Gaza. And I have family in Gaza. So, speaking with family in Gaza, you kind of already know the difficult circumstances that they face with respect to healthcare, even prior to October. Under siege, it’s very difficult to get adequate healthcare, and especially if you require tertiary care, specialty care. The steps you have to take to exit Gaza to access specialty care are extremely difficult.

And so, we were kind of brainstorming ways we could help, whether it be bringing specialists in, or different types of healthcare initiatives that would move the needle for folks on the ground. So, when October happened, it was kind of, for me, it was no longer decision paralysis in terms of, let’s brainstorm, but rather, we need to get on the ground, and I need to do whatever I can to help the people. Because, from the first week, you already started seeing the targeting of the healthcare infrastructure, the difficulty that people were facing with trying to get adequate care, even for their chronic conditions. And I would hear a lot of the stories from family members, when telecommunications would be on and we’d connect with them.

So, for me, it was a no-brainer to go and help on the ground and. I think one of the biggest hurdles, mentally speaking, for a lot of physicians going there is, we don’t want to be a burden on a system that’s already very strained. And then, two, you want to feel like you’re moving the needle. You’re having an impact on people’s lives, and on the health care in general in Gaza.

And so, that’s probably the biggest hurdle to have to overcome for a lot of folks.

MH: Mohammad, can you tell us a bit about the context of the field hospital you set up in Gaza? What was it created to address? And how did you actually experience seeing the influx of patients from the war? How did it match your expectations of what you’d seen previously in your career?

MS: In terms of deciding which NGO to join on the ground in Gaza, for me, one of the biggest things was finding a group that already had some experience working in Gaza, and the length of the mission.

So, a lot of the missions are a couple of weeks, but I wanted to be there a lot longer. And so, the group I went with, it was a five-week mission, with a potential to extend even further. Our goal was to set up this field hospital in Rafah, the Northern border of Rafah with Khan Yunis.

And, for folks who are not familiar with field hospitals, these are tents, essentially, that are set up in which patients are seen and treated. Many times, they’re bare-bones, but sometimes you’re able to get equipment in, and supplies and medications, to be able to provide a little more advanced services.

One of the decisions, in terms of making a decision to proceed with a field hospital, is working within the remaining hospitals at the time. So, as many folks may know, I think there are probably only 11 of 36 hospitals in Gaza right now. There’s been a complete obliteration of the healthcare infrastructure.

And so, a field hospital gives you the ability to go in and really start from scratch, determine where the greatest needs are, and really direct your resources to those greatest needs on the ground. [It] also gives you the ability to break things down and move if you need to. If there’s going to be, say, for example, a ground incursion and a siege of that particular hospital, impeding the ability for patients to reach us at the field hospital. So, in fact, a couple of weeks ago, we did have to move the hospital to a different location in Rafah, in order to serve a larger population as well.

The expectation going in definitely did not meet the reality that I saw. You watch videos, you hear from folks who have gone to Gaza about what the circumstances are like but, as a physician not only having worked in the United States, but also abroad with limited resources, the reality of the limitations of resources to be able to do your job is very painful when you realize, hey, I’m here. There’s equipment and medications just outside the border a few miles away on aid trucks that are not allowed in, and I have a patient who’s dying in front of me. If I only had these pieces of equipment or this medication, I can save this person’s life, but I don’t have access to it. And so, this person will die.

Or, you know, this person’s just had a major surgery, and I can’t control their pain postoperatively, because the pain medicines are outside the border and not allowed in. So, it’s very manmade, as opposed to— You think about limitations that are really out of your hands. Like, no one can really move the needle on those limitations. That’s an easier pill to swallow, but it becomes increasingly frustrating as a physician trying to help save people’s lives and limbs when you go there, you realize the level of atrocity, the amount of children affected, just the demographic of your patient population that’s coming in, and the constant trauma that you see. I mean, it’s never-ending.

I trained on the south side of Chicago and the west side of Chicago. I have never seen this level of trauma on [this] mass scale.

JS: Can you describe some of the patients that you saw, and the types of injuries that you were witnessing and treating?

MS: A lot of these traumatic injuries come in two different forms: one, in terms of blast injuries and shrapnel injuries from missile strikes, and another from gunshot wounds.

The majority of these traumatic injuries are inflicted upon the patients that come to me by drones. So, these are drones that are manned remotely by military personnel, they’re outfitted with high definition cameras. There are fixed-wing drones with precision missiles that can target people with high accuracy and high precision. And then you have quadcopters, which are these smaller drones outfitted with machine guns, and can target populations via their high-definition cameras as well.

A large majority of the traumatic injuries that I saw were in pediatric patients, patients under the age of 17 or 18; actually, even more so, under the age of 12. Even this morning, as I was just thinking about my time in Gaza, I was thinking about this young boy who was about ten years old, who was walking down the street with his sister — who’s probably four or five years old — and a missile struck right next to them, blew out his brains from the left side of his skull.

He came in to me kind of taking his last breaths, agonal breathing. And it was this dystopian image in my mind, because his sister was right next to him, screaming. Shrapnel sheared her right buttock off her body. And it was like this horror movie that I was living in real life, and I continue to remember that.

That sticks with me because it was so representative of the trauma inflicted upon this population, especially the pediatric population. Whereby, not only are they experiencing the physical trauma of a missile hitting next to them, shrapnel shearing parts of their bodies off, a gunshot wound to their chest or their face or their abdomen, but also that psychological trauma that they’re carrying.

You know, seeing her brother taking his last breaths next to her. The constant drones above your head, not knowing when the next strike will be. Day in and day out, every breath that you take, you are experiencing this psychological trauma.

That’s a big part of, actually, what you don’t expect going into Gaza, managing that. Like, how do you treat that? We’re taught to treat the physical aspects of the traumatic injuries and the pain, and experience, already, difficulty with adequately treating those conditions. But that psychological trauma that’s inflicted en masse on the children of Palestine is something like, really, I would say it’s probably the hardest part of the job on the ground there.

The drones outfitted with machine guns; that’s something I’ve never seen, I’ve never encountered. And you’d think the first case that comes in, or the second case, OK, maybe these are one-offs. But you constantly hear from patients as you’re trying to get their history of— What happened to you? You know, drones were above my head, and then I got shot. Ten people picking up firewood to bring heating towards their tent, to warm up their families and to cook, and then a machine gun just opens fire on them.

An eight-year-old girl, Rima, playing outside her tent, shot by a drone. A young boy, Mu’min, who was sleeping in his tent, is 13 years old, and gets shot in his arm and chest. The more you hear about these stories and how they sustain these injuries, the more you see that we’re not dealing with indiscriminate bombings or indiscriminate attacks. These are very deliberate.

I want to share just another story. You know, I took care of many children whose parents were killed in front of their eyes. One child, his name is Faisal. So, Faisal and his brother Adam were in their home, came out to the hallway in their home, and found their pregnant mother and father in the hallway. And the Israeli soldiers shot them, shot the parents in front of their eyes, and then proceeded to shoot Faisal in the abdomen, shearing his intestines and his urinary bladder.

I mentioned this story, one, because it’s unfathomable that this would happen in this day and age, but also because I think it’s important for folks to see this extra layer of pain and suffering inflicted on the surviving family members. It was not uncommon for me to take care of pediatric patients who came in having witnessed their families being killed in front of their eyes, and then having been attacked themselves as well. Either shooting a limb, making sure that they lose that limb, or shooting them in the abdomen. The lucky ones are the ones that really survived to come and be able to be stabilized in our units.

This is, like, multiple layers of atrocities that are inflicted on this population that I myself never witnessed. And I know folks, colleagues who are working with me at the field hospital who had just returned from Ukraine and other conflict areas had never witnessed in their entire careers, many of whom have been working in the humanitarian space for decades.

But, yeah. It’s definitely not something you expect to see ever as a physician, nor should we really see this, especially in 2024.

MH: You mentioned you worked in different field hospitals before, you worked in Chicago as well, too. In many of those cases, presumably, you wouldn’t see huge influxes of wounded people and dead and dying people that you see in some of these attacks in Gaza.

How do you cope as a doctor, or as someone working in a field hospital in situations where you have maybe dozens of people coming in? How do you triage those cases? And what did you see and experience in incidents where there were mass casualties in Israeli attacks in Gaza?

MS: As physicians in the U.S., at least, we’re trained to be ready for any mass casualty incident that may occur, God forbid; so, for example, a mass shooting. Many physicians never experience going through a mass casualty incident, and being required to triage patients and deciding who gets the limited resources and who doesn’t.

Yet, in Gaza, it was constant, it’s constant mass casualty incidents (MCI). It’s bread and butter. Like, a missile strike? You’re getting ready.

You hear missile strikes constantly, by the way. I mean, the closest missile strike to our field hospital, which is supposed to be in a Deconflicted zone — meaning there should really be no military operations within 700 meters of our site — was a couple blocks away. Shrapnel would enter our facility.

And so, mass casualty incidents, for folks who are not familiar with it, is basically a scenario whereby healthcare personnel have to be ready to see patients in the dozens — sometimes we saw up to 70 patients during these MCIs — and determine their injuries, the severity of their injuries, and whether or not we could potentially save their lives or save their limbs.

So, you’re color-coded. Essentially, patients would come in, usually not by ambulance first, because ambulances would be targeted as well. But sometimes, with these donkey carts carrying loads of bodies, or these motorized scooters carrying a trolley behind them. And you really have to just go through and color code them.

So, either you’re color-coded as black, dead, in which case we would send those folks to a corner on our sandy plot of land to be placed in body bags. Black-expectant, meaning you’re really— You’re on the verge of death, and there’s really not much, you’re taking your last breaths.

There’s red, critically ill, you really want to invest the limited resources into these folks because there’s high potential to save them, and they’re really at high potential for a quick decompensation. And then yellow; these are potentially going to turn into critical patients soon if we don’t stabilize them. And then, green; someone, say, shot in the arm or leg, a broken ankle, things of that sort, but can walk or move, the mobility is there. And so, you really target your resources to those folks in the red group first.

It’s extremely difficult. I mean, not only as a physician, [but] as a human being, just having to make those decisions. Because, in many ways, there is objectivity that goes into it, but there’s also some subjectivity, especially in the chaos that’s happening around you. And families sometimes come in and say, please do something for my child, and you know that child is gone. It’s definitely mentally taxing, especially when it’s happening in such high volume and in such frequency, constantly.

I think, for me, the saving grace was the fellow doctors and nurses and staff that I was working alongside. I mean, these folks have been working tirelessly for six months on end, taking care of super-sick patients with very limited resources, and they’re doing this with smiles on their faces. I mean, they’re— I would always hear them saying Alhamdulillah, thank you, Allah, for whatever you give us, and just be accepting of what they have control over and accepting of what they don’t have control over. And that gave me a perspective, and allowed me to actually have the endurance to go through a five-week medical mission, and be able to really focus on what I was sent there to do, as opposed to the things that I don’t have control over.

You imagine folks that have went through one MCI in the United States, and the amount of trauma that, as healthcare personnel, you kind of endure having to go through that MCI here, and just multiply that by a thousand. And that’s every day in Gaza right now.

JS: The Israeli government in its six months of sustained attacks on Gaza has systematically attacked hospitals and medical facilities, killed scores of doctors, nurses, and other medical staff, laid siege to hospitals like— Al Shifa is the most prominent, but it’s certainly not the only one. Abducting medical staff. There’s credible information that doctors and hospital administrators have been tortured in an effort to get them to confess some connection between the hospital and secret Hamas facilities or Hamas members.

I’m wondering of your thoughts. You were there as people from World Food Kitchen were targeted and killed, you’re describing working with doctors that have been there for six months. You know that many of your fellow doctors who are Palestinians in Gaza, and nurses who are Palestinians in Gaza, have been killed or subjected to abuse.

Talk about your perspective on the overarching reality of what has been done to medical workers and medical facilities in Gaza.

MS: It’s probably one of the most important things to talk about. Healthcare facilities should be off limits in general, and we kind of know that, right? I mean, these are lifelines for civilian populations to be able to get the care they need in the most difficult times, right?

And there’s been a deliberate — like you mentioned — it’s a deliberate attack on the health care infrastructure. Whether it be entering, besieging hospitals, and entering and killing health care personnel. I mean, we’ve heard several stories, not one-off stories, of these soldiers going in and shooting doctors, shooting nurses, essentially taking away the ability for folks to get the care they need, not only by limiting supplies coming in by, but by the personnel who would be able to deliver the care that you need. And then you have the attacks on the ambulances, the transportation that would get you to where you need to be to save your life in the case that you become critically ill.

And so, you can see this constant deliberate attack. I was there when Nasser Hospital was besieged and all the healthcare personnel were kicked out or killed. Actually, we received all the patients that were brought out in boluses every night out of Nasser Hospital after three weeks of being besieged. Many of these patients were dialysis patients, children with traumatic injuries requiring orthopedic specialists, people in the ICUs there with infected wounds, chest tubes that were pouring out pus.

The levels, the layers of trauma and pain inflicted upon the population transcend those afflicting just the individual. They are system-wide, whether it be the education system or the healthcare system, or basic utilities, water, electricity, basic things that folks need to live, even with a baseline standard of livelihood.

We brought on board several personnel that worked at Shifa, worked at Nasser, they would relate to me the stories of the atrocious acts that were inflicted upon them with the besieging. The snipers waiting outside to shoot them as soon as they walk out.

And we’ve heard, even, the stories of — even now — doctors and nurses will change out of their scrubs prior to leaving the remaining hospitals, because they don’t want to be targets. Because wearing scrubs or a white coat is essentially a target on your back to be killed or abducted.

You think back five months ago, with the Baptist hospital, the bombing on the Baptist hospital, and this whole debate back and forth. Like, this moral army would never do this, right? Would never. And it’s just these rogue rockets. And then you go to Gaza and you witness the complete destruction. Nobody’s talking about the 20-plus hospitals that have been shut down, that have been destroyed completely, right? Because it doesn’t fall in line with a narrative of a moral army trying to defend itself, right?

Nonetheless, your hat remains on as an emergency physician when you go in and you’re trying to help people. Again, it’s like, what do I have control over? Obviously, I understand that, at any moment, I could be one of those folks that’s abducted or targeted with one of these drones. They can see me, right? With the cameras that are constantly above my head, and I could be a target. But you kind of put that on the wayside, and you try to do what you’re there to do, and to take care of the patients there.

I think it’s, for me, just kind of on a side note, it’s saddening to see that it took a missile strike — actually, three or four missile strikes — on a convoy of international humanitarian aid workers for the world to really be bothered or kind of shaken up. And it just shows us that, one, there’s a level of supremacy that we have internally, which is problematic, and is probably the root problem of all of this, right? When a human being thinks that they’re more superior to another human being, and that they’re more worthy of living than another human being, or worthy of having certain resources than another human being. That opens up a Pandora’s box of allowing oneself to commit atrocious acts. You proceed to dehumanize the other human being to the point where you’ll allow yourself to do anything to them.

I think it’s really sad for me when I saw the amount of headlines and coverage on the targeting of these humanitarian aid workers, when you had almost 200 other aid workers killed in the span of the past six months. And you had 30-plus thousand Palestinians who were killed deliberately over the past six months. And that’s not accounting for the additional probably 10,000-plus that are under the rubble, and the tens of thousands who died as a result of no access to appropriate medical care for other things, like strokes and heart attacks, right? Things that people will die from if they don’t get adequate care.

It just highlighted for me the double standard that we’re seeing. And it’s sad for me as an emergency physician because, for us, anyone and everyone that walks into the ER, we take care of them. It doesn’t matter the language you speak, the color of your skin, your socioeconomic status, how much money you make. It doesn’t matter. I’ll have, many times, in the Valley, in the ER that I work at, you’ll have a billionaire in a room next to a person who doesn’t have much, who’s just trying to make ends meet for the next day, and it doesn’t matter, because they’re both human lives that are worth saving.

You see the complete opposite of that when you’re in Gaza, and this pain is inflicted upon this population, and only certain people’s lives are highlighted in the media, and those are the lives that maybe move the needle in decision-making and policymaking. So, yeah, I feel like it’s such a sad time for humanity right now.

MH: And, Mohammad, I want to ask you a final question to wrap up.

You are an American doctor, but you’re also of Palestinian extraction and, obviously, your family has roots in the region, and so forth. And you went there to Gaza, and you witnessed this, not just as a medical professional, but someone who also is Palestinian, and shares a background and language with many of the people involved in this.

How do you interpret these events in some sense of how we’re contributing to it as Americans, given your own unique vantage point on the conflict?

MS: As a Palestinian born in Kuwait— So, first off, I was never a citizen of Kuwait, because there are rules against that. So, I would travel with a document that says I was stateless. And, in many ways, this was liberating.

Before I became a U.S. citizen in 2005, the 15-year-long trek of becoming a U.S. citizen— So, anyone who tells you, by the way, that it’s easy for someone to just come into the U.S., and get a job, and take over other people’s jobs, it’s baloney. I think it was liberating for me in some respects, being labeled stateless, because it didn’t impede my ability to see our shared humanity.

Sometimes we put up these labels and these borders in ways that separate us and divide us as human beings, as opposed to really bringing us together and appreciating and celebrating our shared humanity and our differences. I think the past six months have been pivotal for Palestinians in general, and what’s happening in Palestine, and what has been happening in Palestine for almost eight decades.

And it’s pivotal because change happens when human beings across the world are awake, aware, critically thinking, using our intellect that is a God-given tool for us to process the world around us and to make decisions. And I would say, up until now, with respect to Palestine, the global population has been herded towards certain narratives that serve only a small group of people, right? And allow those people in power to control, in many ways, various aspects, whether it be economic, or land, or whatnot.

And so, I think this is the first time I’ve seen in mass-scale people waking up, having conversations— Initially, it was very difficult to have these conversations. I would say in October, even into November, because there’s a lot of retaliation. I myself was threatened several times by people within emergency medicine, physicians higher up in emergency medicine, threatening that I would never be able to get a job in the U.S. again, because I’m speaking out against the destruction of healthcare in Palestine, and the targeting of civilians, and sharing people’s stories.

This is also the first time all of this video coverage has come out on people’s cell phones out of Gaza and Palestine, and people are seeing it in real time. And so, there’s not this kind of same spewed narrative that every major network shares on their primetime news that people just take at face value as truth.

And so, I think it’s breaking down a lot of the frameworks that have been put up to divide people, and paint Palestinians amongst other peoples as the other, as less than human; and so, deserving of pain inflicted upon them collectively. And I hope that people just wake up to the beauty of our shared humanity, and how we can overcome, whether it be the atrocities inflicted upon the Palestinians today or any other population decades from now.

How we can overcome that and, one, prevent it from ever happening and, if it were to happen, how we can stop it from progressing to the point where what we’re seeing today in Palestine, where it’s become a genocide.

JS: Dr. Mohammad Subeh, thank you very much for being with us on Intercepted.

MS: Thank you for having me.

MH: That’s Dr. Mohammad Subeh. He returned on March 15, 2024 from a five-week medical mission working with the International Medical Corps in establishing a field hospital in Rafah, Gaza.

JS: Before we go, I want to share with you that Intercepted has been nominated for a Webby Award under the category of Best News and Politics Podcast. Thanks to all of our listeners, our guests, our workers, and everyone that makes this show happen every week. Special shout out to our wonderful producer, Laura Flynn.

There is still time to vote for us, and you can help us win that category by casting your vote. We’ll share the link in the show notes on the page wherever you get your podcasts.

MH: And that does it for this episode of Intercepted.

Intercepted is a production of The Intercept. Laura Flynn produced this episode. Rick Kwan mixed our show. Legal review by Shawn Musgrave and Elizabeth Sanchez. This episode was transcribed by Leonardo Faierman. Our music, as always, was composed by DJ Spooky.

JS: Thank you so much for joining us. I’m Jeremy Scahill.

MH: And I’m Murtaza Hussain.
On his five-week medical mission in Rafah, Dr. Mohammad Subeh recalls treating children whose parents were killed in front of their eyes.
The war in Gaza has been among the deadliest for civilians, including children, of any war in the 21st century. After spending five weeks volunteering and administering at a field hospital in Rafah, Mohammad Subeh, an American doctor, describes what he saw to Intercepted co-hosts Jeremy Scahill and Murtaza Hussain. Subeh spent weeks treating wounded Palestinian children, many of them orphaned by Israeli attacks. He also described treating those who survived the aftermath of “mass casualty incidents” in which dozens of civilians were killed or wounded; many of these attacks appeared deliberately targeted at civilians, Subeh says, rather than “indiscriminate.” As the Strip reels from the consequences of a breakdown of public health infrastructure following the destruction of most Gazan hospitals, Subeh says that ordinary civilians are paying a gruesome price for Israel’s military assault. [Intercepted theme music.] Jeremy Scahill: Welcome to Intercepted. I’m Jeremy Scahill. Murtaza Hussain: And I’m Murtaza Hussain. JS: Maz, I want to start off the show. We’re going to be talking with a doctor who has just come back from Gaza. We’re going to talk about his experiences in a field hospital in Rafah near Khan Yunis in the north of Rafah, as Israel still threatens a full-scale invasion of Rafah. But first, Maz, you’ve been doing some reporting and writing about the recent events between Israel and Iran, where the Iranian government launched a counterstrike on Israel in response to the Israeli bombing of the Iranian consulate in Damascus. Talk about these events, and your analysis of where things stand right now. MH: Since the start of the war in Gaza six or so months ago, there’s always been a fear that the war will expand beyond the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians to include the broader region as well and, most prominently, Iran, and now we’re seeing the first steps towards that. Israel, as you mentioned, they blew up the Iranian consulate in Damascus on April 1, which is a very serious escalation because, from legal purposes, consulate buildings count as a sovereign territory of a state. So, Iran felt compelled to respond to this attack by similarly attacking Israeli territory; in this case, actually, firing ballistic missiles at Israel, and drones. It seems like the escalation or the response by Iran was calculated not to cause damage. They telegraphed their intentions several days in advance, both publicly and privately. And yet, it still represents the first time any state has fired missiles at Israel since Saddam Hussein did it in the early ’90s. So, I think that the Israelis have now said that they’re planning to respond. The scope and scale of that is not clear. But, either way, I believe that this war, the shadow war between Iran and Israel — which has really been the subtext of a lot of the current conflict as well, too — is now becoming less of a shadow war and more of an overt conflict, in which I do believe that the Israelis will try to involve the U.S. as much as possible. JS: It’s also interesting, Maz, that you have what is referred to as this Axis of Resistance against Israel — which involves Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Islamic resistance in Iraq and, of course, the Houthi militias Ansar Allah in Yemen, implementing their blockade — and now, with Iran directly firing missiles, even though it was, as you say, it does appear to have been somewhat of a coordinated strike calculated to have a measured response that would be justifiable in turn. But what is clear is that, in the case of Yemen, in the case of Hezbollah, in the case of Iran, these countries are asserting that they are no longer going to maintain the status quo, where Israel is allowed to act unilaterally, and a nation state like Iran — or a nation state like Yemen — that they’re just going to stand aside and say, oh, yeah, this, this is fine, it’s just the way things work in a so-called rules-based order governed by the United States. It seems like that era is over. MH: Yeah, I think that’s correct. And, effectively, Iran has created this network of militias and groups — which are not its proxies, but you could say it patronizes — throughout the region, and effectively encircling Israel in many ways by these groups, such that they don’t have the latitude to operate in the region as they did before. And Israel, ultimately, is a small country — I think Iran is about maybe ten times the size in terms of population — and it can’t defy the will of the entire region, absent a blank check, that it receives from the United States in this case. So, I think Israel is very much drawing down its accounts at the moment. There’s a bank run on U.S. geopolitical security happening in the region and in context of global events. And it needs to have the confrontation, from its perspective, now, with Hezbollah and Iran and these groups, because the U.S. may not be able to support it in the same way in 10 to 15 years. So, I think from the Israeli perspective, because they do see the shift in the region, their motivation or their incentive, really, is to have a confrontation now, today, when it’s very likely that they could draw upon U.S. carrier groups in the Mediterranean to help them with Hezbollah, or other U.S. assets to help them strike Iran. So, I think that the risk of a war, which people have feared for many, many years, a regional war, is very, very high today, and probably the highest it’s ever been. JS: Maz, before we move to speaking with a doctor who has just returned from Gaza, I wanted to draw people’s attention to a story that our colleague Ryan Grim and myself did this week at The Intercept. The headline of it was leaked: New York Times Gaza Memo Tells Journalists to Avoid the Words Genocide, Ethnic Cleansing, and Occupied Territory. And this was an internal style guide memo that we obtained from within the New York Times newsroom, and it was drafted in the middle of November of last year, and has been updated periodically since then. But, essentially, what it is, is the rule book for reporters that are reporting on Gaza. It tells journalists to severely restrict the use of the term “genocide” to “only discussion of the legal parameters of genocide.” Similar instructions were given about ethnic cleansing. It also says to steer clear of the phrase “occupied territory,” even though international law, the United Nations have determined that all of these areas of Palestine are considered occupied territory. It also directs reporters not to use the word “Palestine” unless they’re talking about the efforts at the United Nations to establish a Palestinian state. And it also tells journalists not to use the term “refugee camps” to describe areas of Gaza that are being attacked by the Israelis. And they’re saying, well, while these are technically refugee camps that were settled as a result of Palestinians being expelled from their homes decades ago, they’re not really refugee camps, they’re more like neighborhoods now. So, we shouldn’t refer to them as refugee camps, unless it’s to explain why other voices are referring to them as refugee camps. And this memo, and the leaking of this memo, comes as the New York Times told staff this week that they had wrapped up an internal investigation into who might have been leaking information to The Intercept. And, of course, we’ve published a number of stories about the controversy that has happened within the New York Times newsroom over the Gaza war. There’s been a rebellion of sorts, or severe disagreements between staffers at the Times about the paper’s coverage of the war in Gaza, about the rules for language that can be used when reporting about Gaza, but also problems with the marquee New York Times story called Screams Without Words that is now considered by many to be the kind of gold standard in proving Israel’s narrative that Hamas engaged in a systematic campaign of rape and other sexual violence during the October 7 attacks. All of that can be found at theintercept.com, the latest story from Ryan Grim and myself. And, with that, I want to bring on our guest now, who is Dr. Mohammad Subeh. He has just returned last month from a five-week medical mission working with the International Medical Corps in establishing a field hospital in Rafah, Gaza. During his five-week mission, the field hospital saw a dramatic increase in cases; they were seeing up to a thousand patients per day, and performing an average of 40 major surgeries daily. Dr. Subeh currently practices emergency medicine at El Camino Health and Good Samaritan Hospital in the San Francisco Bay Area. He joins us now from Washington, D.C. Dr. Subeh, thank you so much for being with us. Mohammad Subeh: Thank you for having me. JS: Let’s begin. I know that your family, that you are a descendant of Palestinians forcibly expelled from their homes, and you’re an emergency room doctor in California. You’ve just returned from a medical mission to Rafah. Give us a little bit of your family background and your professional background. MS: My grandparents lived in a city called al-Lydd in now-occupied Palestine and were forcibly displaced in 1948. They took refuge in a small country of Kuwait, and that’s where I was born. I spent the first six years of my life in Kuwait. Then, the Persian Gulf War in 1990 happened, where Iraq invaded Kuwait, and that was my first exposure to war. And we tried to ride out the war there for about a couple months, but it got to the point where my father was going to be killed, and so, we had to flee within 24 hours. And so, we sought refuge in Los Angeles, and that’s where I spent the rest of childhood, my adolescent years, up through high school. I trained at the University of Chicago after completing undergrad and grad school up at Stanford, and now practice emergency medicine in the Bay Area. JS: And how did you make the decision to travel to Gaza in the midst of this war and siege that Israel has laid on the Palestinians of Gaza? MS: Ever since I became an emergency physician, even prior to that, my goal was to not only practice medicine locally, where it may be convenient for us physicians to practice medicine, but also globally, [in] communities that really need the help. So, annually I go on medical missions. So, I take my older son with me to El Salvador, and we go there for almost two weeks every year. And last year when we returned, he and I and my wife were talking about the possibility of going to Gaza. And I have family in Gaza. So, speaking with family in Gaza, you kind of already know the difficult circumstances that they face with respect to healthcare, even prior to October. Under siege, it’s very difficult to get adequate healthcare, and especially if you require tertiary care, specialty care. The steps you have to take to exit Gaza to access specialty care are extremely difficult. And so, we were kind of brainstorming ways we could help, whether it be bringing specialists in, or different types of healthcare initiatives that would move the needle for folks on the ground. So, when October happened, it was kind of, for me, it was no longer decision paralysis in terms of, let’s brainstorm, but rather, we need to get on the ground, and I need to do whatever I can to help the people. Because, from the first week, you already started seeing the targeting of the healthcare infrastructure, the difficulty that people were facing with trying to get adequate care, even for their chronic conditions. And I would hear a lot of the stories from family members, when telecommunications would be on and we’d connect with them. So, for me, it was a no-brainer to go and help on the ground and. I think one of the biggest hurdles, mentally speaking, for a lot of physicians going there is, we don’t want to be a burden on a system that’s already very strained. And then, two, you want to feel like you’re moving the needle. You’re having an impact on people’s lives, and on the health care in general in Gaza. And so, that’s probably the biggest hurdle to have to overcome for a lot of folks. MH: Mohammad, can you tell us a bit about the context of the field hospital you set up in Gaza? What was it created to address? And how did you actually experience seeing the influx of patients from the war? How did it match your expectations of what you’d seen previously in your career? MS: In terms of deciding which NGO to join on the ground in Gaza, for me, one of the biggest things was finding a group that already had some experience working in Gaza, and the length of the mission. So, a lot of the missions are a couple of weeks, but I wanted to be there a lot longer. And so, the group I went with, it was a five-week mission, with a potential to extend even further. Our goal was to set up this field hospital in Rafah, the Northern border of Rafah with Khan Yunis. And, for folks who are not familiar with field hospitals, these are tents, essentially, that are set up in which patients are seen and treated. Many times, they’re bare-bones, but sometimes you’re able to get equipment in, and supplies and medications, to be able to provide a little more advanced services. One of the decisions, in terms of making a decision to proceed with a field hospital, is working within the remaining hospitals at the time. So, as many folks may know, I think there are probably only 11 of 36 hospitals in Gaza right now. There’s been a complete obliteration of the healthcare infrastructure. And so, a field hospital gives you the ability to go in and really start from scratch, determine where the greatest needs are, and really direct your resources to those greatest needs on the ground. [It] also gives you the ability to break things down and move if you need to. If there’s going to be, say, for example, a ground incursion and a siege of that particular hospital, impeding the ability for patients to reach us at the field hospital. So, in fact, a couple of weeks ago, we did have to move the hospital to a different location in Rafah, in order to serve a larger population as well. The expectation going in definitely did not meet the reality that I saw. You watch videos, you hear from folks who have gone to Gaza about what the circumstances are like but, as a physician not only having worked in the United States, but also abroad with limited resources, the reality of the limitations of resources to be able to do your job is very painful when you realize, hey, I’m here. There’s equipment and medications just outside the border a few miles away on aid trucks that are not allowed in, and I have a patient who’s dying in front of me. If I only had these pieces of equipment or this medication, I can save this person’s life, but I don’t have access to it. And so, this person will die. Or, you know, this person’s just had a major surgery, and I can’t control their pain postoperatively, because the pain medicines are outside the border and not allowed in. So, it’s very manmade, as opposed to— You think about limitations that are really out of your hands. Like, no one can really move the needle on those limitations. That’s an easier pill to swallow, but it becomes increasingly frustrating as a physician trying to help save people’s lives and limbs when you go there, you realize the level of atrocity, the amount of children affected, just the demographic of your patient population that’s coming in, and the constant trauma that you see. I mean, it’s never-ending. I trained on the south side of Chicago and the west side of Chicago. I have never seen this level of trauma on [this] mass scale. JS: Can you describe some of the patients that you saw, and the types of injuries that you were witnessing and treating? MS: A lot of these traumatic injuries come in two different forms: one, in terms of blast injuries and shrapnel injuries from missile strikes, and another from gunshot wounds. The majority of these traumatic injuries are inflicted upon the patients that come to me by drones. So, these are drones that are manned remotely by military personnel, they’re outfitted with high definition cameras. There are fixed-wing drones with precision missiles that can target people with high accuracy and high precision. And then you have quadcopters, which are these smaller drones outfitted with machine guns, and can target populations via their high-definition cameras as well. A large majority of the traumatic injuries that I saw were in pediatric patients, patients under the age of 17 or 18; actually, even more so, under the age of 12. Even this morning, as I was just thinking about my time in Gaza, I was thinking about this young boy who was about ten years old, who was walking down the street with his sister — who’s probably four or five years old — and a missile struck right next to them, blew out his brains from the left side of his skull. He came in to me kind of taking his last breaths, agonal breathing. And it was this dystopian image in my mind, because his sister was right next to him, screaming. Shrapnel sheared her right buttock off her body. And it was like this horror movie that I was living in real life, and I continue to remember that. That sticks with me because it was so representative of the trauma inflicted upon this population, especially the pediatric population. Whereby, not only are they experiencing the physical trauma of a missile hitting next to them, shrapnel shearing parts of their bodies off, a gunshot wound to their chest or their face or their abdomen, but also that psychological trauma that they’re carrying. You know, seeing her brother taking his last breaths next to her. The constant drones above your head, not knowing when the next strike will be. Day in and day out, every breath that you take, you are experiencing this psychological trauma. That’s a big part of, actually, what you don’t expect going into Gaza, managing that. Like, how do you treat that? We’re taught to treat the physical aspects of the traumatic injuries and the pain, and experience, already, difficulty with adequately treating those conditions. But that psychological trauma that’s inflicted en masse on the children of Palestine is something like, really, I would say it’s probably the hardest part of the job on the ground there. The drones outfitted with machine guns; that’s something I’ve never seen, I’ve never encountered. And you’d think the first case that comes in, or the second case, OK, maybe these are one-offs. But you constantly hear from patients as you’re trying to get their history of— What happened to you? You know, drones were above my head, and then I got shot. Ten people picking up firewood to bring heating towards their tent, to warm up their families and to cook, and then a machine gun just opens fire on them. An eight-year-old girl, Rima, playing outside her tent, shot by a drone. A young boy, Mu’min, who was sleeping in his tent, is 13 years old, and gets shot in his arm and chest. The more you hear about these stories and how they sustain these injuries, the more you see that we’re not dealing with indiscriminate bombings or indiscriminate attacks. These are very deliberate. I want to share just another story. You know, I took care of many children whose parents were killed in front of their eyes. One child, his name is Faisal. So, Faisal and his brother Adam were in their home, came out to the hallway in their home, and found their pregnant mother and father in the hallway. And the Israeli soldiers shot them, shot the parents in front of their eyes, and then proceeded to shoot Faisal in the abdomen, shearing his intestines and his urinary bladder. I mentioned this story, one, because it’s unfathomable that this would happen in this day and age, but also because I think it’s important for folks to see this extra layer of pain and suffering inflicted on the surviving family members. It was not uncommon for me to take care of pediatric patients who came in having witnessed their families being killed in front of their eyes, and then having been attacked themselves as well. Either shooting a limb, making sure that they lose that limb, or shooting them in the abdomen. The lucky ones are the ones that really survived to come and be able to be stabilized in our units. This is, like, multiple layers of atrocities that are inflicted on this population that I myself never witnessed. And I know folks, colleagues who are working with me at the field hospital who had just returned from Ukraine and other conflict areas had never witnessed in their entire careers, many of whom have been working in the humanitarian space for decades. But, yeah. It’s definitely not something you expect to see ever as a physician, nor should we really see this, especially in 2024. MH: You mentioned you worked in different field hospitals before, you worked in Chicago as well, too. In many of those cases, presumably, you wouldn’t see huge influxes of wounded people and dead and dying people that you see in some of these attacks in Gaza. How do you cope as a doctor, or as someone working in a field hospital in situations where you have maybe dozens of people coming in? How do you triage those cases? And what did you see and experience in incidents where there were mass casualties in Israeli attacks in Gaza? MS: As physicians in the U.S., at least, we’re trained to be ready for any mass casualty incident that may occur, God forbid; so, for example, a mass shooting. Many physicians never experience going through a mass casualty incident, and being required to triage patients and deciding who gets the limited resources and who doesn’t. Yet, in Gaza, it was constant, it’s constant mass casualty incidents (MCI). It’s bread and butter. Like, a missile strike? You’re getting ready. You hear missile strikes constantly, by the way. I mean, the closest missile strike to our field hospital, which is supposed to be in a Deconflicted zone — meaning there should really be no military operations within 700 meters of our site — was a couple blocks away. Shrapnel would enter our facility. And so, mass casualty incidents, for folks who are not familiar with it, is basically a scenario whereby healthcare personnel have to be ready to see patients in the dozens — sometimes we saw up to 70 patients during these MCIs — and determine their injuries, the severity of their injuries, and whether or not we could potentially save their lives or save their limbs. So, you’re color-coded. Essentially, patients would come in, usually not by ambulance first, because ambulances would be targeted as well. But sometimes, with these donkey carts carrying loads of bodies, or these motorized scooters carrying a trolley behind them. And you really have to just go through and color code them. So, either you’re color-coded as black, dead, in which case we would send those folks to a corner on our sandy plot of land to be placed in body bags. Black-expectant, meaning you’re really— You’re on the verge of death, and there’s really not much, you’re taking your last breaths. There’s red, critically ill, you really want to invest the limited resources into these folks because there’s high potential to save them, and they’re really at high potential for a quick decompensation. And then yellow; these are potentially going to turn into critical patients soon if we don’t stabilize them. And then, green; someone, say, shot in the arm or leg, a broken ankle, things of that sort, but can walk or move, the mobility is there. And so, you really target your resources to those folks in the red group first. It’s extremely difficult. I mean, not only as a physician, [but] as a human being, just having to make those decisions. Because, in many ways, there is objectivity that goes into it, but there’s also some subjectivity, especially in the chaos that’s happening around you. And families sometimes come in and say, please do something for my child, and you know that child is gone. It’s definitely mentally taxing, especially when it’s happening in such high volume and in such frequency, constantly. I think, for me, the saving grace was the fellow doctors and nurses and staff that I was working alongside. I mean, these folks have been working tirelessly for six months on end, taking care of super-sick patients with very limited resources, and they’re doing this with smiles on their faces. I mean, they’re— I would always hear them saying Alhamdulillah, thank you, Allah, for whatever you give us, and just be accepting of what they have control over and accepting of what they don’t have control over. And that gave me a perspective, and allowed me to actually have the endurance to go through a five-week medical mission, and be able to really focus on what I was sent there to do, as opposed to the things that I don’t have control over. You imagine folks that have went through one MCI in the United States, and the amount of trauma that, as healthcare personnel, you kind of endure having to go through that MCI here, and just multiply that by a thousand. And that’s every day in Gaza right now. JS: The Israeli government in its six months of sustained attacks on Gaza has systematically attacked hospitals and medical facilities, killed scores of doctors, nurses, and other medical staff, laid siege to hospitals like— Al Shifa is the most prominent, but it’s certainly not the only one. Abducting medical staff. There’s credible information that doctors and hospital administrators have been tortured in an effort to get them to confess some connection between the hospital and secret Hamas facilities or Hamas members. I’m wondering of your thoughts. You were there as people from World Food Kitchen were targeted and killed, you’re describing working with doctors that have been there for six months. You know that many of your fellow doctors who are Palestinians in Gaza, and nurses who are Palestinians in Gaza, have been killed or subjected to abuse. Talk about your perspective on the overarching reality of what has been done to medical workers and medical facilities in Gaza. MS: It’s probably one of the most important things to talk about. Healthcare facilities should be off limits in general, and we kind of know that, right? I mean, these are lifelines for civilian populations to be able to get the care they need in the most difficult times, right? And there’s been a deliberate — like you mentioned — it’s a deliberate attack on the health care infrastructure. Whether it be entering, besieging hospitals, and entering and killing health care personnel. I mean, we’ve heard several stories, not one-off stories, of these soldiers going in and shooting doctors, shooting nurses, essentially taking away the ability for folks to get the care they need, not only by limiting supplies coming in by, but by the personnel who would be able to deliver the care that you need. And then you have the attacks on the ambulances, the transportation that would get you to where you need to be to save your life in the case that you become critically ill. And so, you can see this constant deliberate attack. I was there when Nasser Hospital was besieged and all the healthcare personnel were kicked out or killed. Actually, we received all the patients that were brought out in boluses every night out of Nasser Hospital after three weeks of being besieged. Many of these patients were dialysis patients, children with traumatic injuries requiring orthopedic specialists, people in the ICUs there with infected wounds, chest tubes that were pouring out pus. The levels, the layers of trauma and pain inflicted upon the population transcend those afflicting just the individual. They are system-wide, whether it be the education system or the healthcare system, or basic utilities, water, electricity, basic things that folks need to live, even with a baseline standard of livelihood. We brought on board several personnel that worked at Shifa, worked at Nasser, they would relate to me the stories of the atrocious acts that were inflicted upon them with the besieging. The snipers waiting outside to shoot them as soon as they walk out. And we’ve heard, even, the stories of — even now — doctors and nurses will change out of their scrubs prior to leaving the remaining hospitals, because they don’t want to be targets. Because wearing scrubs or a white coat is essentially a target on your back to be killed or abducted. You think back five months ago, with the Baptist hospital, the bombing on the Baptist hospital, and this whole debate back and forth. Like, this moral army would never do this, right? Would never. And it’s just these rogue rockets. And then you go to Gaza and you witness the complete destruction. Nobody’s talking about the 20-plus hospitals that have been shut down, that have been destroyed completely, right? Because it doesn’t fall in line with a narrative of a moral army trying to defend itself, right? Nonetheless, your hat remains on as an emergency physician when you go in and you’re trying to help people. Again, it’s like, what do I have control over? Obviously, I understand that, at any moment, I could be one of those folks that’s abducted or targeted with one of these drones. They can see me, right? With the cameras that are constantly above my head, and I could be a target. But you kind of put that on the wayside, and you try to do what you’re there to do, and to take care of the patients there. I think it’s, for me, just kind of on a side note, it’s saddening to see that it took a missile strike — actually, three or four missile strikes — on a convoy of international humanitarian aid workers for the world to really be bothered or kind of shaken up. And it just shows us that, one, there’s a level of supremacy that we have internally, which is problematic, and is probably the root problem of all of this, right? When a human being thinks that they’re more superior to another human being, and that they’re more worthy of living than another human being, or worthy of having certain resources than another human being. That opens up a Pandora’s box of allowing oneself to commit atrocious acts. You proceed to dehumanize the other human being to the point where you’ll allow yourself to do anything to them. I think it’s really sad for me when I saw the amount of headlines and coverage on the targeting of these humanitarian aid workers, when you had almost 200 other aid workers killed in the span of the past six months. And you had 30-plus thousand Palestinians who were killed deliberately over the past six months. And that’s not accounting for the additional probably 10,000-plus that are under the rubble, and the tens of thousands who died as a result of no access to appropriate medical care for other things, like strokes and heart attacks, right? Things that people will die from if they don’t get adequate care. It just highlighted for me the double standard that we’re seeing. And it’s sad for me as an emergency physician because, for us, anyone and everyone that walks into the ER, we take care of them. It doesn’t matter the language you speak, the color of your skin, your socioeconomic status, how much money you make. It doesn’t matter. I’ll have, many times, in the Valley, in the ER that I work at, you’ll have a billionaire in a room next to a person who doesn’t have much, who’s just trying to make ends meet for the next day, and it doesn’t matter, because they’re both human lives that are worth saving. You see the complete opposite of that when you’re in Gaza, and this pain is inflicted upon this population, and only certain people’s lives are highlighted in the media, and those are the lives that maybe move the needle in decision-making and policymaking. So, yeah, I feel like it’s such a sad time for humanity right now. MH: And, Mohammad, I want to ask you a final question to wrap up. You are an American doctor, but you’re also of Palestinian extraction and, obviously, your family has roots in the region, and so forth. And you went there to Gaza, and you witnessed this, not just as a medical professional, but someone who also is Palestinian, and shares a background and language with many of the people involved in this. How do you interpret these events in some sense of how we’re contributing to it as Americans, given your own unique vantage point on the conflict? MS: As a Palestinian born in Kuwait— So, first off, I was never a citizen of Kuwait, because there are rules against that. So, I would travel with a document that says I was stateless. And, in many ways, this was liberating. Before I became a U.S. citizen in 2005, the 15-year-long trek of becoming a U.S. citizen— So, anyone who tells you, by the way, that it’s easy for someone to just come into the U.S., and get a job, and take over other people’s jobs, it’s baloney. I think it was liberating for me in some respects, being labeled stateless, because it didn’t impede my ability to see our shared humanity. Sometimes we put up these labels and these borders in ways that separate us and divide us as human beings, as opposed to really bringing us together and appreciating and celebrating our shared humanity and our differences. I think the past six months have been pivotal for Palestinians in general, and what’s happening in Palestine, and what has been happening in Palestine for almost eight decades. And it’s pivotal because change happens when human beings across the world are awake, aware, critically thinking, using our intellect that is a God-given tool for us to process the world around us and to make decisions. And I would say, up until now, with respect to Palestine, the global population has been herded towards certain narratives that serve only a small group of people, right? And allow those people in power to control, in many ways, various aspects, whether it be economic, or land, or whatnot. And so, I think this is the first time I’ve seen in mass-scale people waking up, having conversations— Initially, it was very difficult to have these conversations. I would say in October, even into November, because there’s a lot of retaliation. I myself was threatened several times by people within emergency medicine, physicians higher up in emergency medicine, threatening that I would never be able to get a job in the U.S. again, because I’m speaking out against the destruction of healthcare in Palestine, and the targeting of civilians, and sharing people’s stories. This is also the first time all of this video coverage has come out on people’s cell phones out of Gaza and Palestine, and people are seeing it in real time. And so, there’s not this kind of same spewed narrative that every major network shares on their primetime news that people just take at face value as truth. And so, I think it’s breaking down a lot of the frameworks that have been put up to divide people, and paint Palestinians amongst other peoples as the other, as less than human; and so, deserving of pain inflicted upon them collectively. And I hope that people just wake up to the beauty of our shared humanity, and how we can overcome, whether it be the atrocities inflicted upon the Palestinians today or any other population decades from now. How we can overcome that and, one, prevent it from ever happening and, if it were to happen, how we can stop it from progressing to the point where what we’re seeing today in Palestine, where it’s become a genocide. JS: Dr. Mohammad Subeh, thank you very much for being with us on Intercepted. MS: Thank you for having me. MH: That’s Dr. Mohammad Subeh. He returned on March 15, 2024 from a five-week medical mission working with the International Medical Corps in establishing a field hospital in Rafah, Gaza. JS: Before we go, I want to share with you that Intercepted has been nominated for a Webby Award under the category of Best News and Politics Podcast. Thanks to all of our listeners, our guests, our workers, and everyone that makes this show happen every week. Special shout out to our wonderful producer, Laura Flynn. There is still time to vote for us, and you can help us win that category by casting your vote. We’ll share the link in the show notes on the page wherever you get your podcasts. MH: And that does it for this episode of Intercepted. Intercepted is a production of The Intercept. Laura Flynn produced this episode. Rick Kwan mixed our show. Legal review by Shawn Musgrave and Elizabeth Sanchez. This episode was transcribed by Leonardo Faierman. Our music, as always, was composed by DJ Spooky. JS: Thank you so much for joining us. I’m Jeremy Scahill. MH: And I’m Murtaza Hussain.