ESL Blogs

my friends in EC know what is my opinion about the Palestinian-Israeli issue, but this time I want to share with you all the words of a man who is living in Gaza, is a doctor and volunteer from Norway his name is Mads Gilbert.This is a open letter he made for the United states president.

Open letter from Dr. Mads Gilbert, a physician working in Gaza

Dearest friends,

Last night was extreme. The “ground invasion” of Gaza resulted in scores and carloads with maimed, torn apart, bleeding, shivering, dying – all sorts of injured Palestinians, all ages, all civilians, all innocent.

The heroes in the ambulances and in all of Gaza’s hospitals are working 12-24-hour shifts, gray from fatigue and inhuman workloads – and all in Shifa Hospital without payment for the last four months. They care, triage, try to understand the incomprehensible chaos of bodies, sizes, limbs, walking, not walking, breathing, not breathing, bleeding, not bleeding humans. HUMANS!

Now, they are once more treated like animals by “the most moral army in the world.”

My respect for the wounded is endless, in their contained determination in the midst of pain, agony and shock; my admiration for the staff and volunteers is endless. My closeness to the Palestinian “sumud” gives me strength, although in glimpses I just want to scream, hold someone tight, cry, smell the skin and hair of the warm child, covered in blood, protect ourselves in an endless embrace – but we cannot afford that, nor can they.

Ashy grey faces – oh NO! not one more load of tens of maimed and bleeding, we still have lakes of blood on the floor in the ER, piles of dripping, blood-soaked bandages to clear out. Oh, the cleaners, everywhere, swiftly shoveling the blood and discarded tissues, hair, clothes, cannulas – the leftovers from death – all taken away … to be prepared again, to be repeated all over.

Please. Do what you can. This, THIS cannot continue.

More than 100 cases came to Shifa in the last 24 hours, enough for a large well trained hospital with everything. But here – almost nothing: electricity, water, disposables, drugs, OR tables, instruments, monitors – all rusted and as if taken from museums of yesterday’s hospitals. But they do not complain, these heroes. They get on with it, like warriors, head on, enormously resolute.

And as I write these words to you, alone, on a bed, my tears flow, the warm but useless tears of pain and grief, of anger and fear. This is not happening!

And then, just now, the orchestra of the Israeli war-machine starts its gruesome symphony again. Just now, salvos of artillery from the navy boats just down on the shores, the roaring F16, the sickening drones (in Arabic, “Zennanis,” the hummers) and the clattering Apaches. So much made and paid in and by the U.S.

Mr. Obama, do you have a heart? I invite you to spend one night – just one night – with us in Shifa. Disguised as a cleaner, maybe.

I am convinced, 100 percent, it would change history.

Nobody with a heart AND power could ever walk away from a night in Shifa without being determined to end the slaughter of the Palestinian people.

But the heartless and merciless have done their calculations and planned another “dahyia” onslaught on Gaza.

The rivers of blood will keep running the coming night. I can hear they have tuned their instruments of death.

Please. Do what you can. This, THIS cannot continue.

Mads Gilbert, MD, PhD, is professor and clinical head of the Clinic of Emergency Medicine at the University Hospital of North Norway. Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh teaches and does research at Bethlehem and Birzeit Universities in occupied Palestine. He serves as chairman of the board of the Palestinian Center for Rapprochement Between People and coordinator of the Popular Committee Against the Wall and Settlements in Beit Sahour. He is author of “Sharing the Land of Canaan: Human Rights and the Israeli-Palestinian Struggle” and “Popular Resistance in Palestine: A History of Hope and Empowerment.” He can be reached at mazin@qumsiyeh.org.