Haifaa Younis – Doctora, don’t be scared
AI: Summary ©
The speakers discuss the importance of not giving up on behavior and trusting the future. They also talk about the need for human beings to see their bodies and the importance of knowing the "will change" and "will be grateful" moments in life. The recent events in Turkey and Syria highlight the need for people to be prepared for future events and to be aware of the "will change" and "will be grateful" moments in life. They also mention a woman who was dis displaced from the North and was not prepared for the events.
AI: Summary ©
Your time going to Gaza.
How was your experience?
Alhamdulillahum Wa Rahmatullahi
for having me. Alhamdulillah. Allah made it
happen. How was my experience?
There is no word.
You know, Al Kalam Yaskut?
The words, the speech becomes hollow and has
no meaning.
This is how it is.
I have to say I'm extremely grateful to
Allah
He gave me this opportunity,
but whatever I say,
it will not give it justice,
Subhanallah.
Lessons and lessons you'll learn from these people.
I honestly don't know how they have been
doing this.
For 6 months now, we're getting to the
7th month.
The whole 8 days we were there,
not as the only word of complaint, if
you want to even call it complaint, I
heard
was one of the nurses looked at
me
and
says,
We're tired.
It's
SubhanAllah
SubhanAllah.
You obviously were watching it SubhanAllah for the
months leading up to it. We even did
a talk together about
how we could observe you know such resilience
from afar.
Was there anything that was different about
being there versus seeing it from afar? Was
there anything that surprises you or anything that
was reemphasized to you when you were there?
Absolutely.
The magnitude
of
it. With the hospital we were there, it's
2 buildings.
1 is the main hospital,
ER and everything, and the other one was
the maternity building. Once the war started, the
maternity building became the trauma center.
But that's not it.
The hospital more than 50 percent of the
people in the hospital are not patients. They're
actually they call them displaced, mohajarin.
As you enter, on the left side,
there is
a mattress, and there is a woman.
So I saw her day 1, day 2,
day 3, it.
So I had to talk to her, and
she said, I've been here
for 3 months.
Me and my Allah.
Me and my daughter.
One mattress.
What do you eat? Whatever they give us.
Whatever rabijeeb, whatever Allah brings,
where is the bathroom
for the patient in here? And here is
every corner.
To walk in that building you have to
say, Excuse me, Assalamu Alaikum. Because either there
is injured, there's family,
there is stretchers
to get up.
And this woman,
where is your family?
She said, have gone,
and a couple of them are still in
the north. These people are all came from
the north, from Gaza City. She says, My
husband and son
are still in the north. My daughter with
me, the rest I don't know.
And you know what? I don't know me.
Yeah.
May Allah forgive me for this, but just
to make it clearer for everybody. You know
when they want you to taste something, they
say this is appetizer.
Everything we are seeing, including from
the journalist inside, is
1, 2, 3 percent
from what
we saw and when you are there and
you see day in, day out.
Enough
for 8 days.
You live with this sound, zzz.
And I was like, what is this?
Because my bed was exactly next to the
window.
And they say it's so casual. Oh,
this is the drones.
Dukhtura,
don't be scared.
I said drones. Said oh no as long
as you hear it
then you're safe. It's when it's quiet
you need to
be careful.
And if you hear the sound of bombing,
you need to smile. Listen to this,
SubhanAllah.
If it is coming to you, you will
feel nothing, either you will feel nothing because
you're dead
or the next thing you'll see everything is
in your head, you will not hear the
sound of the bombing.
Almost everyone I spoke to will this end,
what will happen? Nobody can predict but they
have this faith
that it will end.
SubhanAllah, there's a culture that develops around being
in a genocide.
Tactics that people learn how to cope with
and things that become street instincts for the
kids, for the elders.
When you were there and you were kind
of living it
and seeing the people
running back and forth,
did you feel like people had given up
on Gaza as a whole?
At all.
SubhanAllah.
2 things you
hear every age I talked with.
It's our land, we're not leaving.
Those who may be not as strong as
this, they say, leave, go where?
No one said, except
if they are, if they have elderly,
like parents or people who are sick. For
example, there was a girl, SubhanAllah,
for 6 days as we walk to go
to our room,
you pass, of course she's in the corridor,
has
leg injury. It is not amputated actually. One
of the surgeons here saved it. And then
she you know, we speak and she's very
bubbly,
happy
child, 11 years old. I don't know who's
with her, and then she looked at me
one day and says,
guess where I'm going tomorrow? I said, where?
Smiley. So I'm going to Egypt.
And I said, why? She said, because they're
gonna take care of my leg.
That's the only reason why she is
happy.
But the fact they wanna leave,
no. Mhmm. Everyone says when we go back.
Even when we are leaving, it was very
emotional when we're leaving. It's like next time
because we are in the middle, we're in
Derballah. They said next time you're coming visit
us on Gaza, Gaza City in the north.
Assalamu alaykumu Rahmatullah. I'm actually talking to you
from the call room at Shuhada Al Aqsa
Hospital where I just came from the ER,
and I saw a patient with vaginal bleeding.
And you can just hear that's an ambulance
because there was a bombing and shelling this
morning. There is not a single place
in this hospital.
No waiting room, no corridor
that is not
filled with patients either on stretchers or most
of them are on the floors. This needs
to stop. There is no reason
on earth
that this should continue,
or there is no reason on earth that
this should not stop.
Civilians should not pay the price for this
at all.
So I wanna kinda walk back
to when you first got there, when you
first got the call,
when you knew that you were going,
I know that you'd let me know SubhanAllah,
it was it was at that time only
a few people that knew you were going
to Hazza
from Umrah.
When you step into that world,
what's the first thing that hits you as
you step into that world? Let me take
you back. Okay. I I didn't get the
call. Okay. I wanted to go.
Mhmm.
Since I learned that people are going, physicians
are going, I start filling every application.
Nothing.
Nothing, SubhanAllah.
And then,
Ramadan start day 4 a friend of mine
said fill this one, this one probably they
will
I filled it, nothing.
And I really wanted to go
because I felt
the least I can do
is what I'm doing right now, right? Even
if I'm not gonna do a lot of
medical work, which I did alhamdulillah,
but somebody has to do something at least.
Finally, we are on a group in Southern
California, Muslim Physicians.
Before Ramadan, they put a picture of 1
of the female physicians. Out of the blue,
I don't know the woman. I texted her,
and I said, I wanna go.
And she said, Doctor Haifa, you wanna go?
I said, I wanna go. She said, I
can't now.
You have to be after Ramadan. I said,
I can't after Ramadan. I have work and
everything. It has to be in the last
10 days of Ramadan. That's my day off.
These are my days off. Normally, I have
nothing in the last 10 days,
And she said, let me see. Till 2
days before we're going, we didn't know we
are going. They prepped us that you may
be in Egypt,
and they will not let you go.
Allah made it happen.
Still, when you are in the car and
it's 16 hours car
ride, it is only 5 hours, it's 4
50 kilos, but there's a lot off.
So you reach to Rafah,
it's 2 sides. So this is the Egyptian
side, a gate, and the Palestinian
side. You leave the Rafah, the Egyptian. You
get to the Palestinian, you don't see Ghazayed
because you go right away to the immigration.
They kept you there till everything, you know,
the usual.
The moment you come out, what do you
see?
Number 1, you don't see any of the
destructions, any of the things you have seen.
And on the left side you see, and
I have a picture of it actually,
a big sign in red says Gaza.
Beautiful.
I looked at it and I was like,
am I here?
Is it real?
Subhanallah.
And then we were there for about 2
or 3 hours.
It's almost Maghrib time, and I hear someone
is reading Quran.
What a voice.
Mhmm. Just waiting for the adhan. And, actually,
we had Maghrib
in at the border under the sign we
had dates and water, subhanAllah.
There is no words. It's joy,
it's happiness,
it's
you don't believe what you are there,
scared, you don't know what is going to
happen,
but overall
grateful.
I kept saying You Allah I don't deserve
it,
but you are generous.
How
do you explain that to someone who doesn't
understand?
Why would you go put yourself in a
war zone
where the air strikes are
frequent, where the Israeli government has shown no
regard for any humanitarian law, international law? I
mean, people of all sorts are getting killed.
How do you explain that to someone that's
not Muslim?
A colleague comes up to you or says,
you know,
why is it that you would put yourself
in that situation and then find joy in
it? My colleague,
she texted me and says, happier Ramadan and
happier Eid, and I said I'm Al Ghazza.
She didn't say anything. 2 days later she
texted me and says, are you okay? Yeah.
So when I came back and she said
I was doing rounds, there was another, Palestinian
physician, and I was telling him she is
there. He said, Is she okay?
Is she alive?
She asked me,
I tell you what. I think
we as a human,
we really need to think of our humanity.
Muslims, but I'm talking about in general.
What is a human being
if you don't feel the others?
If you don't feel you if you can
do something, you can do it for the
others. Otherwise, we're gonna be what?
So what can we do? This is and
again, I said this actually at the border
after we passed. I looked at my colleagues
and I said, I always
felt
being a physician
is a profession gives you a lot.
Yes, it's it's a humanity, we help people,
but reality
gives you a lot.
This is the only time where I'm so
grateful I felt it at the border. I'm
so grateful to Allah, I am a physician.
Because without being physician, this is probably will
be very difficult. And number 2, exactly.
Why do you wanna do that? That's when
you say,
being a physician is a humanitarian.
It's you help people.
And absolutely,
that's what they told us, all of us.
Even I didn't deliver a lot. I delivered
only 2 people because the
the drive from the hospital to the other
hospital was not very safe. So they kept
telling me not today, maybe tomorrow, maybe tomorrow.
But everyone looked at me especially, or everybody
actually. They said, the fact you are here,
tell us that you care.
I never thought that I am
doing something
big or I'm risking my life. I just
felt I have to do it.
Each one of us who can
they should do it. And you know what?
Allah said that the dust that you are
running away from it is
gonna meet you. Right?
Even if you were in a really big
fortress,
death will come. So running, not going because
I am gonna die, well, any minute we
can die.
It's gonna be tough.
It was the toughest thing I've seen in
my life,
But we need
it as a human to change, to feel,
to grow, to mature. You have to see
this. Honestly, I wish
every
teenager living in this country, again, this is
a wish,
I wish I can take them just to
go and see.
So you see what the reality of life
is outside the bubble we are all living
in, the bubble of comfort,
the bubble of abundance,
the bubble of, may Allah forgive me, ungratefulness.
You go there and you learn from them.
How do
you sort of convey to a young American
Muslim that has such different concerns, whose priorities
are so wildly different?
How do you convey to them that what
you're witnessing is a proof for you or
against you in regards to your deen?
2 things,
when I spoke to them
a good number of them and I spoke
to almost every ages,
some of them showed me picture of their
life before October 7th.
It is a big open prison
but they have
adapted themselves to live. Some of them lived
very comfortable in whatever is available.
For example, they tell you on the weekend
we go to the beach. It's a beautiful
beach,
and we have this, we have that.
What I will tell to every American teenager
or everyone who's living in this, things can
change in a minute.
Allah changed things.
And I always looked around and I said,
this could happen to me. Yes, I live
in the States. Yes, Alhamdulillah,
but Allah is capable of doing anything. So
the first thing I say,
especially to the youth, don't think this is
gonna be always like this. Allah can change
it. That's number 1. Number 2,
are you ready?
This what striked me, Sheikh Omar,
as if they were ready,
as if they were ready. We were talking
before we started.
When you talk to the young people, you
don't say
you don't say, do you know Quran? You
don't say, have you read Quran?
Are you half of
the norm? And then they put their head
down like that and said,
Listen, and you're talking about
15 or 14 or 13. Yeah. I met
the imam, subhanallah,
who led us for Taraweeh
and Tahajjud,
Abdullah.
23 year old,
I didn't know the man, he's reading beautiful.
You Allah
Taraweeh
we start 12:30
we finish at 3 sometimes 3:15
so the last day as he was greeting
us I said Abdullah Masha'Allah
you're half
Dactora, I'm not a half elf,
and I'm an Ahlis Safwa.
I'm from the selected
and I said what is that You Abdullah?
He said we are the Ahlul Safa are
those huffav
who recite the whole Quran
in one sitting.
And he said, and I said how long
this will take? And he said normally
8 to 2.
Me about him it took me to 4.
I said why is that You Abdullah? Because
I had some mistakes and they wanted me
to review before.
So
this is how I felt,
nobody nobody is ready for what I saw
but Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala literally,
daayukalifullahu
nafsaneillausa'a
You know the real meaning of it? If
Allah tests you of something that means you
can do it?
I felt the people of Gaza. Allah have
prepared them for this test.
The 10 nights
when I opened the door of the room
we were in, it's a courtyard, again, everybody
was living there.
Everyone
was reading Quran
or praying.
Fajr
because we couldn't go to Masjid, so we're
praying in our rooms. Fajr in that small
place, all these are displaced people, young and
old. They were all doing Fadur and Jama'ah.
Nobody was sleeping.
And Jama'ah to the point we opened a
little bit the door so we can join
them. Everybody was reading Quran.
That's what
the youth needs to know here,
that
there is way more than, Please forgive me,
ice cream or iPhone,
which college I'm going to go to.
There is more in this life that we
really need to be ready. Enjoy the blessings
of Allah.
Yes, but also don't make it the focus.
The kid the youth of Gaza
will not have anxiety
because they are applying for college.
The youth of Gaza, their anxiety, and I
honestly didn't see the anxiety we all talk
about here. I met 4 girls,
18,
16, 14
and 10.
And these all 6 months are sitting home,
there's no schools. And the 17 year old
was applying to college to Jamia Al Istaniyah
which was completely ruined.
And nobody worried. Their mother was a little
bit worried about the older one.
Where is she gonna go for call? But
there was no anxiety.
It's something that's why I told you beyond.
They said, we have to give you a
gift. I said, no, thank you. What gift
you will give me? Yeah. I see. Literally,
these 4 girls, they went.
Their father is a physician, they lived very
good life before now they are living only
one room,
they went and brought
a chocolate box.
Subhanallah
they opened there's no chocolate
there were all these small beads different color
and they said, we're gonna make a bracelet
for you. And how are you gonna make
it? You know what? It's also creativity.
Right. They had a rubber band,
they chose it and they make it. Their
brother, Muhammad,
is 11 year old, so I was teasing
him. I said, Yeah, Mohammed, come and help
them.
That's girl's job.
Mohammed,
just come and help. I know. But you
see, they are making their life as normal
as possible. Mhmm. They are not
I think they were the way they were
raised before is on this. This is what
I was telling you. They were not prepared
for this, but the way they were raised
up, that they have a bigger
mission.
I interviewed, I put it on social media.
A woman was dis displaced from the North,
separated from her husband and son,
older son and the younger son with with
her, and she's and I said, how how
did you do it? Walked 10 kilometers. She
and her son in the night, in the
cold, with all the soldiers on the top.
She said, I always grew up and I
taught my children
that this life is temporary. I'm living for
the akhirah. Allahi, this is the word. If
there is
a lesson that all of us have to
learn from Gaza,
add to it all what we have been
talking to is, this dunya is,
will change, tataqalab,
nothing will stay,
get ready and be grateful.
Be grateful to everything we have.
Wanna ask you, you know, last year
or rather the year prior the earthquake happened,
Turkey, Syria, you went to the earthquake site.
I guess walk me through what's the difference
between being in a place where an earthquake
has just struck and the place where there's
an active genocide.
What what are some experiences,
similarities, differences that you found between the 2?
SubhanAllah. You read my mind, shikham. Mhmm. Because
that question came as I was walking.
The earthquake,
the destruction
was phenomenal.
And when I again talked to people there,
the
common word, I said, what happened at 4:23?
They said, we heard
and we thought it's the day of judgment
almost everybody
and then the shook
walls fell and we run.
The difference is the following,
this is Qadarullah,
there's no injustice in here that you see
it.
2,
the whole world
stood with them,
right?
You turn on the TV people are talking
about it. Every
person that can help helped.
There was no discrimination,
no, in Turkey
was Qadrullah
destruction,
they are living
in They were living in tents, I saw
it, but they were better than what I
saw. Plus,
they had hope, they knew within a year
or a 2 lakhs they will build it,
they bring them back.
Here you're talking about a systemic
plan
to move people, to kill people,
and to move them out and you're not
gonna go back.
You tell me,
why do you destroy all schools? I just
got this morning from somebody from Gaza. The
ministry there released numbers.
Why do you destroy hospitals?
Why do you destroy schools?
And probably when you will meet with the
other physicians they will tell you, especially the
surgeons, you know what they target?
If they don't want to kill you or
kill me they target your limbs.
Why?
I didn't see this in Turkey.
I saw misery, but that's Qudar Allah. And
everybody said, Qudar Allah Mashha'afa.
But this is And it was one day.
This is not 6 months
and non ending. And everybody was saying, Move
to the north. Even that lady I was
telling you about who said, We live for
the akhirah, she said, I said to the
soldier I said, really? You said this? I
said, yeah. I said, you told us we
are we are civilians. You told us move.
We moved. She said, 3 places in the
north I moved. Mhmm. And every time I
move, they come after us. The way it
is is very different, and the future of
it is
I want you to, I mean if you
don't mind
dig as deep as you can
and the one story that you think will
live with you forever. If there's one person
that you saw, like, just one person who
was like, this is the one that I
will never forget this person?
It's Mahmoud.
What is the story of Mahmoud?
Mahmoud, his family lives about 5, 10 minutes
from the hospital. Now, the people in Gaza
lives usually in buildings,
and this building is usually for a family.
So you have one floor, let's say the
parents, then if there's, the daughter is married,
or the son, or the uncle, so it's
usually family.
He said, I came to work
and he's volunteering
and then
they start bringing people.
It was my house
which was completely bombed.
No one survived.
My father is in his forties, mother 37,
18 year old. He's 18, 16,
I think was 104.
And I said, and
what are you doing right now?
He said, I've been living in this hospital
since that time, about 3 months now. He
said, they gave us a mattress. What are
you eating? He said, whatever they give us
in the hospital.
What about bathroom and shower
with the with the patients?
And the same clothes for 8 days.
That's an 18 year old full of life.
That could be any 18 year old here.
I understand.
And one young man, Allah,
23 year old,
they said, Come and greet him because you
are the only physician who speaks Arabic in
that group. I said, Okay.
Why do I see You Sheikh Omar?
Completely cut,
no legs, no legs up to the thigh,
nothing.
And this is gone.
So basically just this part.
Of course, clearly emaciated.
This is working and all the fluids and
everything.
I can't remember his name.
And You Allah had a smile on the
face of this young man.
Alhamdulillah,
alhamdulillah.
Honestly, I did not hear, I couldn't
sit for more than 5 minutes cause I
was like, You Allah,
You Allah, you know the Sahaba story we
hear about and we say, you know, and
we say, really?
These are these people. He's smiling, his wife
next to
him, alive,
The scene that will stay with me
is the scene of the hospital.
It is not a hospital, it's not a
market,
it's
chaos.
To move
in between you have to say, Assalamu Alaikum,
excuse me. Assalamu Alaikum, excuse me. And people
will
move
away in every corner of that hospital.
Grant them victory
and help and patience and allow us to
be there with them.
Any take home message or last thing that
you want to share with the people? What
they told me,
because I asked them what do you want
from us?
And more than one person said, we don't
need anything.
They need a lot.
But there is a, and they said, just
go back,
tell people about us,
don't forget us,
we are here,
we are living.
And when you come to visit us,
that had a lot of impact on us.
Because I kept saying, I didn't do much.
She said, you not to me, us.
You all did a lot.
Go back
and speak about us and remind people about
a place called Gaza.
Alakkumullah.
Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala give them victory, and
Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala,
Gaza will be free and Palestine as a
whole will be free, and
we want to thank you once again for
going there on our behalf, and insha'Allah next
time we'll get to be with you.
One day. Nothing is impossible for Allah.