EDEN MILLS – Resilience, generosity and playfulness were among the themes of Dr. Nour Khatib’s recent presentation about her work in Gazan hospitals last year.
“I felt the love of the people around me,” she said of her time in Palestine.
About 50 people were at the Eden Mills Community Hall on May 12 to hear Khatib share her experience.
Khatib has lived in Canada since she was 16 but was born a Palestinian refugee. She was never able to visit her homeland before her humanitarian trip in 2024.
Supplies
Before entering Palestine Khatib collected donations – she’d heard that she and the 11 others she travelled with would be allowed 100 bags between them, so she worked to fill huge duffel bags with supplies such as medicine, food, water, medical equipment, diapers and formula.
“Mothers are knocking on hospital doors asking for formula,” Khatib said. “They are so malnourished that they can’t produce breast milk.”
A pharmacist in Egypt sold Khatib many of the supplies at a discounted rate as she prepared to enter Palestine through the Rafah border crossing.
When the day came to cross the border, Khatib and her colleagues were told they could bring 80 bags – not 100, so they had to make a last minute decision about what to leave behind. “How do you chose what bag is more important – hepatitis C tests or amoxicillin?”
That was only the beginning of the hard choices Khatib would be faced with as a doctor working in Palestine.
When she entered Gaza with a van loaded with supplies, she knew she’d already done something to impact the locals’ lives.
Rafah’s population had recently grown from 300,000 to 1.5 million due to the number of displaced people and there was a significant shortage of resources.
But this shortage didn’t stop people from sharing the little they had, Khatib said: “We got invited to dinner left right and centre.” If a family had just two potatoes and an onion, they’d offer to share their meal, she said.
A young boy was looking for drinkable water and when Khatib offered him a bottle, he asked how many she had. When she said just the one, he tried to insist she keep it for herself, she said.
“The generosity, the kindness, it’s not anything I had ever experienced.”
Beyond resiliency
Khatib described the constant sound of drones overhead (sometimes just a couple metres above her), makeshift tent cities, cemeteries, demolished buildings, and smoke billowing from where bombs had recently dropped.
The apartment building she stayed in during her trip is now among those demolished buildings, she noted.
“All night, you feel the building shaking and you hear the bombs,” she said. “It was just happening nonstop – and this was in an area that was supposed to be safe.”
Khatib spent most of her time working in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) at the Al Helal Al Emirati Maternity Hospital. That hospital, along with three of the other four she worked at, is no longer standing.
In the NICU Khatib witnessed “resilience on another level” from the doctors, nurses, medical students and other Palestinians working there.
Most work for free, she noted, as the hospitals don’t have money to pay them.
She described how one med student showed up to her shift the night after her home had been bombed – a bombing that killed her cousins and uncle. Khatib saw many Palestinians make similar choices – to keep working in the face of acute tragedy.
One student pushed back against the word resilient, noting “we didn’t choose this.”
But they did choose to get up every day and keep caring for their community, Khatib said.
A big part of Khatib’s role was to relieve local healthcare workers who were beyond burnt out – some working shifts more than 30 hours long, without needed resources.
Khatib described incubators meant for one baby filled with four or five, doctors making diagnoses from only the simplest of blood tests and giving babies stitches without anesthesia or freezing.
The maternity hospital’s occupancy rate had swelled from 80 per cent to 290%, and the infant mortality rate from 2.5% to 12%.
Khatib also worked at Yousef al-Najjar Hospital, where she saw skull fractures, shrapnel injuries and a bullet in an 8-year-old’s head.
‘Kids will be kids’
But she also treated a child who broke his arm playing soccer, because even in a war zone, “kids will be kids.”
Khatib described children performing a song for the international doctors, noting, “They made us feel welcome. They wanted to show us how beautiful their country is.”
She laughed about one kid who she couldn’t get to stop sticking his tongue out in every photo.
She played soccer with them while two armed drones circled low over their game. The drones made Khatib nervous but the children said “we have to still play.”
When they heard bombs dropping nearby, the children said “don’t worry, the fact that you heard it means you’re alive!”
When they weren’t playing the kids sometimes drew math problems in the sand, as they couldn’t go to school.
There’s a group called Camp Breakers, led by two teenagers who entertain kids and teach them breakdancing. When the volume of nearby bombing increased, the teens would turn up the tunes to drown it out and distract the kids.
Khatib shared a story of a colleague telling some Gazan children that Khatib is “Palestinian, just like us.”
She felt honoured that he said that, but she doesn’t see herself as like the Palestinians in Gaza, claiming she doesn’t have their resilience or bravery.
On Khatib’s last day in Palestine, she was driving with some colleagues when they heard yelling and saw a crowd on a beach. They found a 12-year-old boy who had drowned in the ocean.
Khatib and her colleagues spent 25 minutes trying to resuscitate the boy, but he did not make it. If there were paramedics on scene sooner, Khatib is confident “he could have survived.”
People had tried to get help but Gaza’s “healthcare system is completely crumbled. There is no way to call an ambulance.”
They couldn’t find the boy’s family, so decided to bring him to the nearest medical clinic, driving with his head in Khatib’s lap and his body across her colleague’s lap.
“This is as a result of no healthcare system, no help, Khatib said. “How are kids supposed to live their life?”
Guelph 4 Palestine
The event was organized by Rockwood family physician Dr. Rabia Khan, a member of Guelph 4 Palestine.
It’s a grassroots group including healthcare providers, parents, teachers and community members working to educate people about what is happening in Palestine.
According to a report published by the IPC, or Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, on April 12, Gaza’s entire population is facing high levels of acute food insecurity and half a million people there (one in five) are facing starvation.
Guelph 4 Palestine is connected with families living in Gaza, and event attendees were encouraged to make donations to the group that are transferred to these families for them to buy food.
Donations can be sent to guelph4palestine@gmail.com.
