Israeli soldiers turn Gaza-bound doctor back at border

FERGUS – Dr. Hassan Kapasi hardly seemed to think twice about the dangers of volunteering at Al-Aqsa hospital in Gaza. 

He saw a need that matches his skill set and set up a month-long deployment.

It wasn’t his first time volunteering abroad. Kapasi has worked with the Red Cross in Iraq, Bangladesh and South Sudan. But for much of the last two decades, Kapasi worked in Fergus. 

He and his wife, Dr. Sarah Gower, opened a family practice on Tower Street in 2009. For a while, Kapasi juggled family medicine with anesthesiology and emergency medicine at Groves Memorial Community Hospital before withdrawing from the family practice.

About 10 years ago, Kapasi started working in the emergency department at Guelph General Hospital, alternating between Groves and Guelph hospitals until last September. 

He now focuses on anesthesia and emergency care in Guelph while providing occasional fill-in care at Groves. He’s also a McMaster University professor.

Kapasi said he decided to go to Gaza because of the scale, horror and intentionality of the destruction there.

“Rafah is just dust and rubble as far as the eye can see … it looks like a lunar landscape ... all the buildings have been levelled.

“The utter scale of destruction is unprecedented,” he said.  And people keep dying, every day, in spite of a ceasefire Kapasi calls “fiction.” 

According to an April 2 report from the United Nations, 713 people have been killed in Gaza since the ceasefire was announced in October, and another 1,940 have been injured.    

Kapasi worries Gaza could set a precedent, describing it as “a lab experiment of how do we completely control and surveil a population, using weaponry in a way never used before.” 

According to the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, “the ongoing conflict in Gaza is rapidly transforming how information is processed and used in warfare,” including the AI-enabled decision-support systems that Israel uses for targeting. 

According to the Cairo Review of Global Affairs, Israel is one of the world’s largest arms exporters relative to its size, and its use of new military technology in Gaza demonstrates “the effectiveness and ‘efficiency’ of AI-enhanced warfare in real time .... and its AI technologies are likely to become core components of its growing defense export portfolio.” 

“What’s happening in Gaza is unique because it might just be the beginning,” which impacted his decision to go, Kapasi said.

His deployment was set up through Humanity Auxilium, a U.S.-based NGO (non-governmental organization) and one of about a dozen organizations globally that is allowed to deploy emergency medical teams to Gaza. 

Humanity Auxilium executive director Dr. Faiza Hussain worries the precedent goes event further, and told the Advertiser “Israel has now set a precedent for the world to accept genocide as ‘acceptable.’” 

Asked if he was afraid, Kapasi said “working in Gaza is a lot safer than you might think it is. Each NGO and the UN take good care to mitigate events that happen to foreign nationals, which is not fair to the locals – that we are under a separate umbrella of protection.”  

Kapasi packed a sleeping bag and mat, a water purifier and a month’s worth of food including ramen, oatmeal and power bars. He said Gazans often invite guests to eat with them but it’s vital not to take too much as there isn’t enough to go around. 

Between Oct. 16 and Nov. 30, around 1.6 million people in Gaza faced high levels of acute food insecurity, according to the most recent report from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), the world’s leading food crises authority. 

Kapasi couldn’t bring food, medical supplies or other aid to distribute, as this is against Israel’s rules. He was allowed one duffle bag and one backpack, containing personal supplies only, including what he’d need to work, such as scrubs and a stethoscope.

He travelled from Jordan to the Israeli border on a UN bus with other medics on Nov. 25, and said most people on the bus had stethoscopes and similar supplies.

At the border crossing, Israeli soldiers searched their bags. Of the 20 or so people on the bus, Kapasi said just he and the Humanitarian Auxilium surgeon he was set to work with were stopped. 

A soldier said: “‘you can’t bring in these supplies – these are medical supplies,’” Kapasi told the Advertiser. 

Hussain said Kapasi was carrying a stethoscope, less than 50 sutures, a small pair of scissors for the sutures, a small handheld ultrasound probe, and some personal medication.

She said though volunteers are not allowed to bring medical supplies into Gaza, doing so is necessary because of the constant shortage there. 

“Sending a physician without medical tools is like me sending a plumber to your house without any tools; he may be skilled but without his tools, the job
doesn’t get done.”

Kapasi said he explained the stethoscope was not for distribution – he needed it to do his work, and the soldier responded, “‘No, you don’t listen to your heart with a stethoscope, you use a stethoscope to listen to other people’s hearts.’” 

The medical supplies were all confiscated and never returned, and Kapasi and the surgeon were both turned back to Jordan.  

But Kapasi tried again on Dec. 5 at the recommendation of the World Health Organization. He didn’t bring any medical supplies this time and said border officials hardly spoke to him and didn’t go through his luggage.   

They held his passport, he said, while they slowly returned the passports of the other 40 or so medics travelling with him in the second UN convoy. 

After about three hours they said the rest of the convoy could go ahead into Israel. They held Kapasi for another hour before returning his passport, along with a document stating he was denied entry due to “public security or public safety or public order considerations.” 

Kapasi said the form represents a permanent ban from the country, but no one told him what led to him being deemed a threat to the public. 

The first time he was turned away, Kapasi felt completely deflated. “By the second time, though, I started to realize this is part of a system of control,” he told the Advertiser. 

From Kapasi’s perspective, permission to enter is granted in a seemingly random and arbitrary way, which he said is “part of the architecture of control.” 

Hussain told the Advertiser “medical personnel have the highest denial rate for entry to Gaza, about 41 per cent.”

From her perspective, “Israel wants to continue to strangle the people of Gaza despite the façade of a ceasefire and they do so by any means possible, and one of them is to deny them access to healthcare.” 

The Israeli consulate did not respond to the Advertiser’s inquiries. 

If Kapasi had made it into Gaza, he would have supported Palestinian doctors, nurses, students and residents working in emergency and anesthesia at Al-Aqsa hospital. 

He said many patients come through with injuries that aren’t directly related to strikes or gunshots, including long-lasting infections made worse by malnutrition and a lack of access to antibiotics, lacerations from falls or falling rubble or debris, and the same ailments as he sees in Fergus and Guelph such as coughs and colds, heart attacks and strokes. 

Palestinian emergency departments run a lot like Canadian ones, he said – doctors assess patients coming through, figure out a treatment plan and admit them and refer them to surgery when needed.  

The hospitals are set up to function without the international volunteers, Kapasi said, who are really there to provide relief for locals who often work around the clock. 

The international doctors also offer teaching sessions to Palestinian medical students, who Kapasi said haven’t been able to receive much formal education in the last two years. 

Though volunteering in Palestine is no longer an option, Kapasi said his humanitarian work is far from over. 

Volunteering internationally offers an opportunity to support people with “vastly fewer resources than we have here in Canada, [who] are still managing to thrive and survive and struggle,” he said. 

“The resilience you see is amazing,” he added, with people “trying to do their best for their families and communities” in the midst of war zones or natural disasters.

“It’s really humbling,” Kapasi said, and it helps him realize his own privilege and appreciate the health care system in Canada.

However, he did note, “I see in emerge every single day the system in Canada is not working as it should.” 

He connected issues with Canada’s health care system to intersecting global issues such as expanding wealth gaps, affordability crises, climate change, ecological destruction, resource scarcity, a rise of fascism and international conflicts including the one in Gaza.

He has a few places in mind for his next volunteer journey, including a return to Sudan or Bangladesh.

But Kapasi said when it comes down to it, there’s no knowing what will happen next in the world, and he is ready to go wherever there is a need.