Reflections on Medical Conditions in Gaza by a Recently Returned Nurse
Our chat with Louis, an anarchist emergency room nurse who has just returned from a second tour doing healthcare work in Gaza and is about to leave again. During this difficult conversation, we talk about medical conditions that he encountered in Gaza, what aid is getting in and how it’s being distributed, health infrastructure and how this relates to his prior mutual aid and anti-border work in the so-called USA. You can find a prior interview with Louis from Living and Fighting blog.
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Transcription
Louis: My name is Louis. I live in the US-Mexico borderlands. I use he/him pronouns, and I’m an emergency room nurse.
TFSR: Could you tell us a little bit about where you just came from and what work you were doing?
L: I just came home for a break about a week ago. Immediately prior to that, I was in Gaza for seven weeks, and I was also there for a month in the spring, working with a small NGO that mostly focuses on emergency and trauma care. My work looked a little different between my two trips there, but this last time there, for seven weeks, most of my time was spent working in hospitals in the central Gaza Strip.
TFSR: You are an emergency room nurse, so traumatic incidents seem like the majority of what you would be dealing with, but I would imagine that the scale is so much larger, obviously, in a war zone. Can you talk about if you had been to similar situations before, in the past, doing medical work and your motivations for entering this dangerous place to provide health care?
L: I did not have experience working in active conflict zones like this before. I’ve done some grassroots disaster relief work for many years and, amongst other things, medical support for people crossing the US-Mexico border near where I live. I’ve done over the years a lot of street medic work in the States related to dealing with militarized police, but nothing that I would consider to be an active conflict zone or anything approaching this scale. In terms of my motivations, it came out of a desire to show active and practical solidarity with the Palestinian people. I’ve been involved in pro-Palestine movements for quite some time now, and when the war broke out, I started trying to find a way to go help and, with my skill set, it seemed like a place that I could try to show solidarity and try to mitigate some of the harm caused by the ongoing genocide.
TFSR: Can you talk about your various deployments and the changes that you’ve seen in terms of access to medical care infrastructure, like you mentioned being in a hospital in the mid-Gaza Strip, and just the general conditions that you’ve been working under, and for the people that you’re giving medical aid to?
L: Conditions are much worse in every way than they were in the spring during my first visit. I can adjust those things, separately and together. One is that the ongoing destruction of all infrastructure has continued. So water infrastructure, sanitation infrastructure, everything that’s needed to try to keep people healthy has been destroyed, especially in the center. Almost every medical facility in Gaza has been seized by the Israelis and/or destroyed by aerial or ground bombardment. Many of those hospitals have been able to reopen in some limited capacity, but it’s far more limited than it was. In terms of displacement, the biggest difference was the Israeli army entering the south with its incursion into Rafah, which resulted in both the closing of the Rafah border and the displacement of probably a million or more people who had been sheltering in Rafah after being displaced from the north and the center, then being moved forcibly either back to the center or into a coastal humanitarian zone. So there is a huge, much larger portion of the population squeezed into a much tinier area, and the infrastructure to support those people doesn’t exist anymore. Much worse conditions for health, for sanitation, for general living than in the spring.
TFSR: There have been news reports about polio coming up in large degrees in some of the measurements of the septic system, and I’m sure this has led to the wider spread of other diseases that pretty much don’t exist in a lot of Western countries outside of emergency situations, like dysentery. Is that a thing that you were coming across on your last visit?
L: Yeah, we haven’t started to see acute polio cases in the population. The wastewater surveillance is an early warning sign, and a very bad and very dire warning sign, but one that we haven’t started to see a whole lot of yet. Probably the biggest disease we wouldn’t be seeing otherwise that there’s a huge outbreak of is hepatitis A, which is spread through the wastewater and the sewage that’s everywhere in the streets. I haven’t seen the statistics in a while, but I think just documented or suspected cases are in the tens of thousands. Some people are jaundiced and wasting everywhere you look. Lots and lots of hepatitis A, lots of diarrheal illnesses that we don’t have the resources to diagnose specifically but are contributing to people’s malnutrition. There are a ton of skin diseases, scabies, lice, and other outbreaks because there’s people barely have enough water to drink, much less clean with. I’d say those are the main things in terms of disease outbreaks that we’re seeing there.
TFSR: Can you talk about, in your most recent deployment, who were the patients that you were able to give care to and some of other conditions that they were suffering from?
L: I pretty much gave care to anyone, all ages and everyone. Disease-wise, probably the gastrointestinal stuff that I mentioned is the biggest thing, the hepatitis A, undifferentiated diarrheal illnesses from lack of clean drinking water and sanitation. Also, anyone with any chronic disease is getting either no or very limited treatment, so people with something that would normally be pretty easily managed, like high blood pressure or heart issues, most people can’t get medication for that. Nobody has refrigeration anywhere, so people don’t have access to insulin. Anyone who has diabetes has their blood sugar wildly out of control. Anyone who’s a cancer patient, except for very limited cases of people managing to make it out of Gaza, has not been able to get treatment since October, in many cases, or a little more recently, in some others. One of the things that I think will be really shocking when more information is compiled as the war goes on and hopefully ends is what we would call the excess deaths, the total excess deaths resulting from the war. The number that gets thrown around about is now something like 40,000 people dead from war-related injuries, which is likely a huge undercount, but that’s the number. There is a huge number of people that have died not directly from a war-related injury, but because the war disrupted their access to regular healthcare medication.
TFSR: Yeah, and I’m sure listeners will be familiar with that metric, just from the early days of COVID, where there was a lot of lack of diagnosis or misdiagnosis or looking at primary causes of death, like heart failure, or other things that would not have been a condition that people would have died at such rates from if not for the compounding instances of COVID diminishing their body’s ability to fight off an infection, right?
L: Totally. That’s also not even including the war-related injuries or trauma patients who either might have lived after their injury if the healthcare hadn’t been so destroyed and there was access to better resources, more operating rooms, more blood banks, more medical supplies, or the people who have died after their injuries because they got post-operative infections and lacked access to appropriate wound care, surgical follow-up, or things like that. The number of people who have died is huge, outside of people who’ve directly died from a war-related injury. Obviously, in addition to the medical patients, there’s a huge load of traumatic injuries, and that’s what I spent the majority of my work on. Our team’s most helpful function is trauma surge support in the hospitals we worked in. It’s hard to explain how traumatic most of these injuries are. More than gunshot wounds, most of what we treated was blast injuries, which just completely ripped people apart. I don’t want to get too much into talking about the dynamics of those injuries and the gore of it, more than to say that the sheer number of people who’ve been injured in really big ways and are walking around with badly healing injuries or disfiguring injuries or injuries that will disable them for the rest of their lives is also huge. I think the last statistic I saw is 100,000 people injured by the war, which, just based on my tiny ground’s-eye view would imagine to be a huge undercount. I’m generally dealing with the acute trauma care, not aftercare, but just anecdotally, based on my personal experience, there is also a crisis that will be ongoing of disability in Gaza, too.
TFSR: It’s been under blockade. Obviously, this has stepped up in the last few years and in the last nearly year of active invasion, and there have been attempts to break the blockade, which seem to me mostly symbolic, but still good-natured, like ships trying to bring medical and food and other supplies through the port. Can you talk about what is able at this point to get through to the Gaza Strip, and how does that compare to the needs? Where is aid unable to reach?
L: There’s definitely some aid getting to all parts of Gaza. It’s grossly insufficient. One of the biggest changes in the last several months that happens is that prior to May, there was a land crossing in Rafah, which was a land crossing directly between Egypt and Gaza. There was a degree of Israeli influence and control over what came through that crossing through cooperation with Egypt, but it was much less tightly controlled. There was an already insufficient amount of aid allowed to move in through the Rafah crossing. Most of the struggles at that point were distributing it to the north. In May Israel took that crossing and destroyed it, and it’s been closed. Now the crossings in are only through Israeli-controlled territory, so one in the south at Karem Abu Salem, very close to Rafah, and one in the north, that they just started moving in through after they took the Rafah border in large amounts. That’s the Erez Crossing in Jabalia and Beit Hanoun. The amount is insufficient. There are very heavy restrictions on what can move in. They have restricted humanitarian workers from bringing in supplies with us. So when I crossed through Rafah the first time, we came with probably 30 large crates worth of medical supplies and equipment. We were doing that every two to four weeks, bringing in that amount of material, just my team. Humanitarian aid workers are now not allowed to bring in anything with us, other than personal baggage, and what’s coming in on the trucks is a tiny fraction of what’s needed.
The other issue is that the Israeli army has systematically targeted civilian government apparatus in Gaza, including the police, which means that previously, there might be some protection from the police for aid convoys moving north from Karem Abu Salem or south from Erez. Now thanks to that power vacuum, there are armed groups, gangs, and large families who are blockading, stealing the aid, reselling it, and doing things like that. So right now, part of the issue is things crossing the border from the Israeli side, but the larger issue is moving things from that border crossing to the places they’re needed in the rest of Gaza without everything on the trucks getting looted. All of that is to say that the needs for aid of every kind, food, fuel, medical supplies, medical equipment, and infrastructure is huge, and only a tiny portion of what’s needed is getting through. I think I saw the news that the northern Gaza water authority and sanitation authority had somehow managed to get a delivery of 50,000 liters of fluid into the north to run things like wells and sewage pumps and desalination plants, and that was a big deal that they were able to get that much. But actually what’s needed for the whole Strip right now is 70,000 liters per day. From a fuel standpoint alone, it’s nowhere close to what’s needed.
TFSR: I think that, probably not listeners to the show, but some people might just fixate on the looting, sending stuff in, in the first place, isn’t going to get to where it needs to get to. And that is an important point, but also, the situation would not be where it’s at if not for the war going on and the strangulation of the Gaza Strip at each of the points of entry. People end up doing pretty desperate things when they’re locked in an ever-shrinking cage.
L: Totally. It’s really complicated. Some of the looting is organic. I would call it organic from people around. A lot of it is from organized armed groups who are then hoarding the aid and selling it. But all of that is to say that what makes all of that possible is both the shortages and the displacement caused by the war.
TFSR: We’ve heard this official death count that the US and international agencies are recognizing of being about 40,000 people dead at this point since the invasion in October. But healthcare providers and orgs, as you mentioned, are saying that the numbers are much higher. Part of that’s going to be based on the count of whether they’re counting secondary infections, depressed immune system, or lack of medical care. Can you say anything more about that number? If you’re on the ground doing stuff, I imagine it’s pretty hard to try to get a big sense of of what the overall numbers might be.
L: Totally. We talked already about this concept of excess deaths, not related specifically to war injuries. But the only other thing that I would add to the 40,000 to this point being an undercount is that there are surely thousands and thousands of people buried under rubble whose bodies and remains haven’t been found and won’t be for a long time until that’s moved. A lot of people get dug out and found. But also, there are so many buildings that are collapsed and need the deconstruction of 10-ton, 20-ton concrete slabs. I think if it ever reaches a point where the rabble can start to be cleared, that count is going to go up a lot.
TFSR: Yeah, and I’ve seen video back in November, December, and January of Israel moving in a lot of earth-moving machines to clear areas for their military operations in Gaza City. I would imagine that would compound that. I’m sure that they were not trying to retrieve bodies from the rubble when they were running tractors and stuff through the demolished buildings.
L: Yeah, they’ve done that in three main strips. One is what they call the Netzarim Corridor, which is just north of Wadi Gaza, separating Gaza City to the north from the center to the south and making a huge strip. They’ve also made a buffer zone all along the separation wall to the east. Then they’re currently doing the same thing to make a corridor in the south along the border with Egypt and Rafah and just demolishing every house and every building in that area.
TFSR: There’s been much documentation of the Israeli occupation forces systematically invading and destroying healthcare facilities in Gaza, which you mentioned, like sieges as well as invasions of those, as well as other things, like water infrastructure and the electrical grid. This comes alongside attacks on local ambulance services and international NGOs like Doctors Without Borders and UNRWA. Could you talk about what you’ve witnessed or heard anecdotally on the ground in terms of military engagement against humanitarian projects and medics?
L: Yeah, there’s so much. I don’t even know where to start. I think just to give a few examples, the first time I was there, I was very close to a hospital in Khan Yunis that was seized by the Israelis, which is a tactic that they used a lot all over Gaza. When there was a hospital that they considered to have “terrorist activity,” often they would seize the entire hospital, bombard It, shoot at it, take it over from the inside, and as part of that would generally expel staff and/or patients, the patients who weren’t able to move usually died, and then they would either during the seizure, or punitively after, destroy a huge amount of the medical equipment in the hospital. That happened to a hospital I was close to and working with a lot of staff from in the spring. More recently, while I was there, in one of the hospitals I was working at, we were working at it while it was shot by a quadcopter drone. Also a lot of the ambulance drivers I work with experience responding to air strikes afterward and then having their ambulances targeted by the drones when going to try to retrieve casualties. Those are some personal anecdotes. I mentioned earlier that almost every single hospital has been attacked and partially or fully destroyed. Aside from what I personally saw, emergency medical services have been systematically targeted to the point that often they’re no longer able to go into zones of active fighting because they’ll just get shot and killed every time. I don’t have a top-level view or inside knowledge to know whether the healthcare facilities are being systematically targeted for being healthcare facilities, or whether it’s just in disregard of that, in pursuit of Israeli war aims.
TFSR: I guess it could take some speculation as to what the intentionality of targeting those institutions is. If the claims are that terrorists are being harbored in them, or they are terrorist organizations, then people should decide whether or not to take that with a grain of salt. But there is a technical understanding of the term genocide that reflects the targeting of communities’ abilities to stay alive and the attacking of life-saving infrastructure, like desalination or medical supplies. It feels pretty clear, intentions aside, in application there’s a very strong argument to be made there.
L: Totally. In terms of the medical facilities, I don’t have an educated enough opinion on whether they’ve been targeted for being medical facilities or in disregard of it. But I think if we’re talking about water infrastructure, sanitation infrastructure, electrical grid and generation, desalination, and things like that, we can very easily say that these have been systematically and deliberately targeted in an effort to make Gaza unlivable and that those things have been systematically destroyed in a deliberate effort to destroy water, sanitation, and electricity infrastructure.
TFSR: Since before the first Nakba, Palestinians have experienced displacements, separation, murder, and deprivation by settler colonists. The sustaining of these conditions is known to create lasting impacts on human bodies and communities in terms of mental and physical health. Can you speak about, to your understanding, what outcomes can be expected from this current situation?
L: This is a great question. I don’t feel I have the knowledge or background to answer it, either from my life before this, or my experience on the ground there, but hopefully, people much smarter than me will answer that question. Very good one.
TFSR: Do you have a sense of if the scope of the genocide is making its way into the consciousness of the nation’s funding and arming it—Israel, the US, Germany, the UK, etc—based on interactions with folks from those places that you’ve had or what you’ve seen of media representations? It’s one thing for the policy wonks and talking heads on TV to talk about numbers and what’s going on and troop movements and whatever, but I’m sure that what the people on the ground, including yourself, have experienced and witnessed makes all the terrible videos on Instagram and TikTok pale in comparison, you know?
L: I would like to think so, but I’ve mostly not been either around or very online for the last several months. I don’t have the best sense of what things are looking like politically outside of Gaza. I would like to think so. I would hope so. I think this has been an extremely online genocide, which is good for trying to raise some awareness and not have it happening in darkness. I do think we’re starting to see some slow political movement in the countries that have traditionally funded Israel towards more “accountability” or more “moderation.” I think it’s a tiny difference. Sometimes it’s hard to feel it when the news is that the US is having harsh words and the relationship is on the rocks. Then we just saw this week they released another $3.2 billion in funding. It might just be lip service, but I think at least in the aesthetics of those state-to-state relationships, we are starting to see some change. There’s been a huge change in the population level, how people who are not in government or invested Zionists are looking at Israel and seeing those relationships with their countries.
TFSR: The amount of conversations that I’ve witnessed, or the secondary effects of that has been extraordinary, and the amount of people taking to the streets and genuinely being distraught, impassioned, enraged about the actions that are being taken with their tax dollars.
L: Totally. When I first started getting involved in pro-Palestine activism a long time ago, it was mostly something that was undertaken by people of Arab ethnicity, or Palestinian refugees themselves, or the descendants of Palestinian refugees, or a pretty small section of radical left anarchist movements, but what we’ve seen is just a huge mainstreaming of that activism, which is really cool and impactful to see.
TFSR: And I think also the ripple effects of people undoing the work of Zionist indoctrination in their communities and their families and whatever, just the amount of people saying like “Wow, this is not as it’s been told to me, and this is being done in my name,” like Jewish folks coming out and showing up and putting themselves into very public and dangerous positions in order to protest this whole genocide has been really inspiring.
L: Yeah, people are believing the lies a lot less.
TFSR: In a prior interview that you gave, you reflected on comparisons between your work at the US and Mexico border in terms of technologies and techniques of control and displacement. I wonder if you can share some of these thoughts and how they’ve changed as this violence has escalated in the occupied territories.
L: I don’t remember exactly what I said in that interview. But one of the things that’s pretty striking after spending time working on the US-Mexico border is working in a place where there’s a border around the outside and nobody can leave, and within that border, people are also being constantly surveilled and displaced. To give you just a sense of what that looks like in Gaza right now, the entire strip has been divided by the Israelis into “blocks,” which are lines drawn on the map that denote a neighborhood. At any moment they choose to, they will issue evacuation orders through texting people’s phones, because they have everyone’s phone numbers, dropping leaflets through media, that people living in x number of blocks need to leave. That could be one small neighborhood. It could be an area with 100, 200, 300,000 people in it, the size of an entire city.
Generally, when those evacuation orders are issued, people might have an hour to get out before the bombardment starts. People get these orders and they move because they have to. Since October, people have been chased around Gaza and pushed from one corner of this prison to another, over and over again. I talked to people who evacuated 10 times with their families from one place to another. It’s all enabled by multiple things. One is that people have nowhere to go. They can’t leave, they can’t remove themselves from the fighting. The other is that Israel is playing a sick game with people’s lives, where, aside from killing anyone they want, they just move people from place to place to help with their military objectives. They can do it because people have no other option.
TFSR: And that just makes me think too—again, back to social media, because this is such an online genocide that’s occurring—seeing the videos being compiled by people of occupation forces, individuals filming themselves walking into people’s houses and apartments, putting on clothing, rifling through their personal effects, destroying family heirlooms. Each time, if you look at what happens when houseless encampments get evicted in the US and people get shoveled from one place to another, every step of the way, people lose items, they lose generational wealth, they lose medications, they lose technology, cell phones, and stuff like that. It’s, in and of itself, besides the bombardment, besides the infrastructure being destroyed, it makes people feel destabilized, it leaves them without their warm clothing in the middle of the winter.
L: Totally, and that’s so true with this. The vast majority of people at this point are living in tents, and every time they move if they have time, they take down their tent. If not, they can’t, and they lose their tent and their structure. And if it’s further than they can walk, and they don’t have their own transportation, they need to pay someone to take them on a donkey cart or a tuk-tuk or a car or something like this. Every time people have to move, they lose so much, and people are doing it over and over and over again, and that’s not even really talking about the psychological effects of the displacement. Moving from a place where you had a tent set up in some space to the “humanitarian zone” on the beach and not even being able to find somewhere to place a tent, it’s really crazy.
TFSR: Have you read Border & Rule or any Harsha Wallia [books]?
L: What was it, Undoing Border Imperialism was by her?
TFSR: Yeah, yeah.
L: Yeah I read that one. It’s been a while.
TFSR: Border & Rule came out in 2021 and it’s dense, and it’s really good, but it’s weaving… It feels really productive and connected to the conversations that of a lot of people that I’ve heard of talking about borders and about refugees, and about climate change and the impacts of that and prisons and police and tying all of these things together. So, when you said the thing about being in a place where the borders are around you, instead of dealing with the liminality of the border and going back and forth over it. That made me think of that book.
L: Yeah, it’s crazy. You know, I spent all winter on the border wall down here and just that started dying down a little bit. And then I chilled for a couple of weeks and then I went to Gaza. The first thing I did when I got there was enter through the Raffa crossing and then drive alongside another huge-ass wall. It’s like, fuck, man… It’s one like from one wall to another, it’s crazy.
TFSR: Yeah. Another strong takeaway that I had from your prior interview with Living and Fighting (which we can link to in the show notes) was your expressed feeling about the impacts of social movements engaged by Jewish advocates of Palestinian liberation, anarchists, and others in places like the US that are again enabling this violence. Can you talk a little bit more about what effects you’ve seen this activism having on the war?
L: I touched on this just a little bit before, and like I was saying, it’s hard to feel good about the activism and its effects when we’re 10 months in at this point and the genocide’s ongoing and nothing has changed and things have only continued and really hard to be like “We made a difference. We did this thing.” But it has had an effect, and that effect has really moderated the amount of force that the Israelis have been using in Gaza. From the outside, it feels insane to be like, “Oh, they bombed 10 school shelters this week, but they used the small bomb, not the big bomb, so only like 30 people died and 100 people were injured, instead of 100 people dead and 400 injured.” I’m saying this as they just used the big bomb on a school in Gaza City. But in general, most of the school strikes have been with smaller munitions. It feels really insane to be like, “So we’re winning. They use the small bomb.” And we’re definitely not winning. But I can tell you that working on the ground there and having 100 trauma patients at once versus 400 trauma patients at once is a big difference and matters for people. Do I think we’re winning? No, not now. Do I think the social movements have had an effect? Yeah. Aside from these tiny mitigations going on now that it moderated some things, I do feel that there has been a big change in the mainstreaming of pro-Palestine activism, and I don’t think it’s going to go away. Hard to congratulate ourselves for smaller bombs, bigger cages, and longer chains, but I do think it’s made a difference and hopefully will continue to in the future.
TFSR: Just to editorialize, having the answer for how to stop the world’s largest empire from enabling its proxy state across the world from doing what it’s doing is not an easy question to answer. And what would be the alternative to people even marching in circles and shouting into empty buildings? Not doing that? And then this just going on in the shadows and in the silence and not affecting, not forcing people to have awkward dinner conversations or conversations with people they go to church with, or their co-workers. It doesn’t have to be winning to be important, which doesn’t mean we shouldn’t expand our horizons and try different methods. Not having any faith in politicians having consciences or human emotive, realistic reactions to situations like this, they’re only going to do things because people make them uncomfortable about a thing. The more that people are making them uncomfortable and willing to engage them and yell at them and call them genociders, it’s not for naught.
L: I think so too.
TFSR: You found a way to use your experience of showing up amidst disasters to employ the skills that you’ve developed in order to impact immediate aid on people going through hell. Do you have suggestions of ways that people can skill up to do this work, or are the groups doing effective work on the ground worth engaging with and supporting?
L: Obviously my skilling up over my life through this work has been pretty highly professionalized. I went to nursing school. I spent a long time working in ERs and doing medical work outside of the hospital until I got to the point where I was prepared to do this, and I still didn’t feel ready when I went. But the reality is that I was prepared from a skill standpoint to do that. I think there is a lot of value in our communities towards acquiring medical skills, and it doesn’t have to look like going to nursing school. There are a lot of other ways to do that. There are wilderness first responder classes and EMT classes, and we give each other Stop the Bleed classes. There are a lot of ways to gain those skills. But also, thinking through what are the things that communities need in times like that, what do our communities need. People should learn about water and sanitation, community health and health promotion. Mutual aid groups in the States have done a lot of work in the last several years to encourage people to think about disaster planning on small scales, like what are our resources, how do we support each other? I think that’s worth thinking through. I want to value the work that everyone does in conflict zones like this, not just medical workers. Many professional humanitarian aid workers who are technical specialists or administrators or organizers are doing incredibly important and very, very brave work. People work on food. People work on water. This all matters.
TFSR: So there are lots of ways to scale up that aren’t just doing what you’re doing.
L: Totally.
TFSR: This is unrelated to that topic, in a way, but it made me want to ask. Some people choose to go in and do this work to care for other people in a dangerous situation. The story here is the fact that there is this dangerous situation. But is it worthwhile talking about burnout or the long-lasting trauma among the people that go to do the aid work as well for sustainability of that work?
L: I don’t have great thoughts on that, because the way that I generally engage in projects in my life is to go with them in very hard and intense ways during periods of intensity, and then take breaks afterward, or ideally, try to do less intense support work in the in-between times. That’s generally worked for me. But I think that burnout is super real. I’ve never done work of this intensity personally, so I don’t have much wisdom to share about strategies for avoiding burnout. What I can say has worked for me in the past is doing intense work in strong, supportive communities, trying to take breaks, focusing on strategies for resiliency, like personal health, and really thinking through the work we did and the reasons that we might feel good or bad about it. I don’t have a great answer for this current work, because I’m still doing it and still going back and forth, and been doing good now but haven’t started unpacking it in a meaningful way.
TFSR: Yeah, I understand.
L: I also just want to put in a note that I spent several weeks in long stretches living in a hospital, not eating well, not sleeping well, getting run down emotionally, physically, health-wise. The healthcare workers that I was working alongside have been doing this for nine months while also experiencing massive personal tragedy and personal displacement. I was working in one of the hospitals when an airstrike killed several family members of one of the ambulance drivers I worked with. I think it matters. But what those of us who go to Gaza to work experience is just a tiny, tiny fraction of what the truly heroic healthcare workers who have been there and live there have been going through, and they keep showing up to work every day and serving the people as best they can. Truly inspiring and mind-boggling.
TFSR: Yeah. Louis, thanks a lot for this chat. Free Palestine!
L: Hell yeah. Free Palestine. Thanks for having me.
TFSR: My pleasure. Unless there was anything else that you wanted to throw in there too, any shout-outs.
L: Yeah. Shout out to the heroic healthcare workers that I had the huge honor of working alongside in Gaza and will continue to work alongside. Also to everyone in the States and other Western countries that fund Israel who have been in the streets, fighting hard trying to end it, I do think it makes a difference now and in the future. Keep on fighting and thanks