Doctor Shares Experiences of Gaza Relief Work

Lily Oberman of the Ithacan Online reports:

Dr. Ismail Mehr, an anesthesiologist for St. James Mercy Hospital in Hornell, N.Y., traveled to Gaza in January 2009 to give aid to its citizens following attacks on the city. Mehr shared his experience and showed slides of his relief work tonight in a presentation called “Gaza’s Dilemma.” The event was sponsored by Ithaca College’s Students for Justice in Palestine, who also brought Mehr to Ithaca College in April.

Beth Harris, associate professor of politics, said she thought the presentation was educational.

“I hope that people who come tonight will get a different picture of what’s going on in Gaza,” she said.

Andrea Levine ’09, who helped bring Mehr to the college in April, said she thinks Mehr’s presentations are always eye-opening.

“Mehr doesn’t just talk about the normal effects of war,” she said. “He educates the public on not just the effects of the attack, [but] normal everyday health problems [of the region].”

Mehr began the presentation by giving a brief history of Palestine. He then showed slides, many of which included his own photos from his 10-day trip to Gaza, providing narration of his trip as he went along.

Mehr traveled to Gaza after a three-week- long war in which Gaza was attacked. The trip was sponsored by the Islamic Medical Association of North America, an organization that Mehr is a member of.

“[The president of IMANA] said the board of directors wanted to try to put a team in Gaza to help provide medical aid,” Mehr said. “I had been on multiple missions before, and they asked me if I would lead this team.”

Mehr had been to places such as Pakistan and Indonesia following natural disasters to provide aid. He said he didn’t hesitate when asked to go to Gaza.

“There was no internal struggle at all,” he said. “I felt that if I said ‘No,’ I would be breaking a promise to myself that if I ever had the opportunity to go and do relief missions again that I would.”

Mehr then gathered a team of 11 doctors, along with two others who helped organize the trip. The group arrived in Gaza on Jan. 22.

“[When] we arrived there, we saw convoys and trucks and aid and people from Portugal, from Cuba, from Canada, from Germany, from the Netherlands, South Africa,” Mehr said. “They’d been waiting there for days and [kept] being turned away.”

The AMMG were denied entrance on the first day, after being told that no more doctors were needed in Gaza and that the borders were closed for the day. Finally, a member of the group called someone who worked at the border and enabled the group to sneak in.

Mehr then showed photographs of destruction that he took when the group entered the city.

“These photos are one-dimensional,” he said. “The destruction was all around us.”

Out of the 13 hospitals in Gaza, five were destroyed in the attacks and many others were damaged. The AMMG went to work in the Shifa Hospital, the only untouched hospital.

Mehr said the hospital was lacking even basic supplies and that the majority of people his group treated were dealing with routine illnesses, such as pneumonia and diabetes. They also worked with cancer patients who could not receive chemotherapy because of the blockade. Some of the slides that Mehr showed included photos of a jaundiced 4-year-old with liver cancer being treated by doctors and a football-sized kidney of a boy whose kidney should have been smaller than a fist. Mehr said he particularly wanted to work with children because he has two young children at home.

In their free time, the AMMG went to the local orphanage. Two doctors from the group stayed at the orphanage over the course of the entire 10-day trip, giving routine health checks to the children. Mehr shared a story about a man who routinely visited the orphanage and returned to visit the children the day after his house was destroyed and his family killed.

“That story got to me,” Harris said. “No one should have to have this kind of resilience.”

Rachel Gunderson ’09 said the presentation was laid out in an effective way.

“Some of the stories were gruesome, but it was influential,” she said.

Mehr said he hopes people walk away from his presentation with the ability to form their own opinions about the politics of the Gaza region.

“I hope they are able to go, read and learn about the realities of Palestine in general,” he said.