Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, May 2025, pp. 62-63, 69
Special Report
By Dr. Swee Chai Ang
IN TWO YEARS, I will have spent half a century working as a surgeon for the National Health Service, following my arrival in the United Kingdom as a tiny woman refugee from South-East Asia. I’ve spent nearly as much time, forty-three years, as a doctor with the Palestinians, and they are still undergoing genocide and threatened with ethnic cleansing. In 1982, I returned from my first medical mission to Lebanon and co-founded Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP). I have not looked back since. Helping Palestinians and the British public has defined my career, but it was not an obvious path from my childhood.
I grew up supporting Israel, not knowing that the Palestinian people even existed; they were simply labelled as terrorists. This all changed when I volunteered as a surgeon to the wounded in Lebanon in 1982 with Christian Aid. I was seconded to work in Gaza Hospital in Shatila, a Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut, adjacent to the Sabra neighborhood, during the ceasefire in August.
I spoke to my patients and their loved ones and learned of the ethnic cleansing of 50 percent of the indigenous Palestinians—750,000 persons in 1948. Until then, I had never heard of their Nakba, the catastrophe, during which 78 percent of historic Palestine became Israel and the indigenous population was forced to flee at gunpoint. I share the year of my birth with the Nakba, an entire lifetime without justice for Palestinian refugees.
Many of the ethnically cleansed Palestinians had fled to Shatila refugee camp, one of 12 in Lebanon, during the Nakba. When I met them, they had already been living as refugees for 34 years. In all that time, a third of a century, they had never been allowed to return to their homeland, even though they had a right to do so under international law.
In these camps, entire lives have been lived. They live as refugees, give birth to refugees and many die there as refugees. This third stage became crystal clear in September 1982, a month after I began volunteering there, when thousands of Palestinians were murdered in cold blood in the Sabra and Shatila massacre in a mere three days. I witnessed and survived that massacre with them.
I left Lebanon in November 1982 to give evidence to the Israeli Commission of Inquiry into the role of the Israeli army in Lebanon. I had gone to Lebanon as a surgeon to help patients, as any doctor would, but having seen what I’d seen, I could not stay silent about the sheer inhumanity and brutality of the killing by a pro-Israeli Lebanese Christian militia working under the control of the Israeli army. My eyes were opened in 1982, and everything I have lived through in the subsequent 43 years has only confirmed that realization.
On my return to the UK, I co-founded MAP, which celebrated its 40th anniversary last year. Since then, I have led many medical missions to Lebanon and Gaza. It is telling that MAP even needs to exist. How many other people across the world need a dedicated medical aid organization at all, let alone one that needs to keep running, decade after decade?
The latest onslaught on Gaza, described by the International Court of Justice as a “plausible” genocide, is just one of countless assaults on the Palestinian people. Exile, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, plausible genocide—these are the practices that stick with me, as it would stick with anyone who had spent decades returning over and over to the camps instead of simply hearing regurgitated and misleading narratives peddled in the media.
On exile and ethnic cleansing—seven million Palestinians live in wretched conditions in the 58 UNRWA Palestinian refugee camps scattered all over the Middle East, created in 1949 under the directive of the U.N. Security Council to mitigate the extreme suffering of the refugees of the Nakba. They have not been allowed to exercise their right of return to their homeland. In fact, 70 percent of those in Gaza are refugees from other parts of Palestine.
Since Oct. 8, 2023, Palestinians in Gaza have been ruthlessly murdered by relentless bombings. They were ordered to flee their homes and found themselves in makeshift tents, in the same way that their parents and grandparents were. They were displaced multiple times and bombed even as they fled, as were their homes, leaving them nothing to return to. Food, water, fuel and medicine were blockaded, acts that were described by Western leaders as Israel’s right of self-defense.
By Feb. 3, 2025—sixteen months into the genocide—more than 61,709 Gaza civilians were already confirmed killed. The true figures are much higher when factoring in indirect deaths and people buried beneath the rubble. Children were frozen to death in tents, infectious diseases became rampant, including polio, due to lack of sanitation; 35 out of 36 hospitals have been attacked; 2.1 million persons displaced; 35,055 children made orphans; 1,367 entire families removed from the civil registry; 1,047 health workers killed. The list goes on.
The world watched, breathless, when a fragile ceasefire was reached on Jan. 19, 2025. I watched with tears as half a million Gazans forcefully displaced to southern Gaza left their tents and walked back toward their homes demolished by bombs in northern Gaza. The roads were bulldozed and covered with rubble and debris. And yet, they had survived against the odds, after 15 months of drone attacks, large bombs, starvation and diseases, and they were determined to return to reclaim northern Gaza and to rebuild their lives.
For a short period, President Donald Trump was seen as the “hero” who forced a ceasefire, stopped the bombs and gave hope to the people whose lives were completely shattered. The genocide had stopped. Food trucks were allowed into northern Gaza.
Not quite yet.
Trump swiftly announced his ethnic cleansing plans to send 2 million Gazans into Egypt and Jordan to build the “Gaza Riviera.” This plan may lack shame in its explicitness, but it is by no means novel in its goal to dispossess Palestinians from their land. This has been ongoing since 1948.
And then there is apartheid. Once a word that was hotly contested, but after a slew of reports from basically every major human rights organization, it is now no longer questioned. Now that Israel has escalated its West Bank aggressions in its Operation Iron Wall, the reality of apartheid across the occupied Palestinian territory is once again in the spotlight.
Would refusal to be ethnically cleansed justify the resumption of genocide? What is there to say? Desperate Israeli apologists cling to whatever they can. Ignoring the International Court of Justice’s provisional measures, they point to the word “plausible,” as though this negates the following word: “genocide.” But that sort of spin doesn’t work on doctors like me who have journeyed for years with the Palestinians—it doesn’t matter how misleading media coverage is, there’s no way to spin the condition we’ve seen our patients in, the same wounds now as the ones I first saw in 1982.
And then there is the scale of destruction. All means for human life and survival have been destroyed: hospitals, schools, solar panels, water tanks, farms, orchards, factories as well as homes, all destroyed. And the cessation of bombs does not mean the cessation of aid blockades. Even now, Israel’s restriction of aid is still causing man-made famine, which not only kills by starvation, but also brings diseases to the emaciated bodies of starving Palestinians. All this makes genocidal apologism simply pathetic.
But despite all this, there is an unbreakable spirit. I saw it in Shatila in 1982 when destitute, homeless orphans defiantly raised their hands to make the victory sign in the face of death, and I see it now in Gaza and their friends.
Last year, I was in Lebanon operating on patients who were blown up by Israel’s pager attacks there. Several thousand civilians were injured when their pagers exploded. Their hands were mutilated; one or both eyes blown out; some had multiple shrapnel wounds across their torsos. Some had nasty brain and facial injuries. But despite the similarity of all these cases, one conversation stood out.
I told a patient with a mutilated hand how I felt sad for him. He replied: “Please do not feel sad doctor, I have no regrets suffering these injuries. This is the price I pay for standing with humanity and justice in Gaza.”
Almost 43 painful years have passed since the Sabra and Shatila massacre. But the spirit I saw then had been alive despite that horrific massacre, and it is still alive now. Despite everything, it lives on. The demolition site which Gaza is today will be rebuilt, olive trees replanted, and the laughter of children will be heard once more. A 77-year-old Gazan farmer was arrested and tortured for more than 40 days, his entire farm was demolished, and his animals killed. He has already started to clear the rubble, to replant 2,500 olive trees. The trees will outlive him and be there for his children and for Palestine—forever.
5 March 2025
Source: wrmea.org