Omar Suleiman – Gaza Diaries – If you Hear Bombing, say Alhamdulilah with Dr. Haifaa Younis
AI: Summary ©
The speaker discusses the challenges of life and the importance of being a physician to help people. They describe the "ENTablement" (the anyone who takes care of people and doesn't kill them) as a systemic plan to move people out of hospitals and buildings, and encourage people to go back to visit and remind them about a place called Corps. They also mention a scene at a hospital where people say "come and grecribe" and remind people of a place called obtain.AI: Transcript ©
Your time going to Gaza.
How was your experience?
Alhamdulillah
for having me.
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
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 re
emphasized 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,
AR 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 rabijib, 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.
Mhmm. 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%
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. He 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.
Two 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.
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 didn't get the call.
Okay. I wanted to go.
Since I learned that people are going, physicians
are going, I start filling every application.
Why is it coming? 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 Ramban.
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're
going. They prepped us so that you may
be in Egypt,
and they will not let you go.
Allah made it happen.
Still, when you are in the car, it's
a 16 hours car
ride. It is only 5 hours, it's 450
kilos, but there's a lot off.
So you reach to, Rafah
it's two 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
cause 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. 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, 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 happy Ramadan
and happier Eid, and I said I'm Al
Ghazah.
She didn't say anything. 2 days later she
texted me says are you okay?
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 can 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, you 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.
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 death 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.
I think let's talk a little bit about
that that American Muslim bubble because I think
you're uniquely positioned to talk about it as
a Darya and also as a doctor.
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?
Two 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,
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,
10
Aja. 10 Aja?
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 full.
Bektura I'm not a half of
and I'm an Ahlul Safwa.
I'm from the selected
And I said, What is that, You Abdullah?
He said, We are the Ahl Safa,
are those huffab
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 is ready for what I saw,
but Allah
literally
daayukalifullahu
nafsanillausa'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 Fajr and
Jannah, nobody was sleeping.
And Jannah, 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 gonna 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
youth of Gaza
will not have anxiety
because they are applying for college. Right.
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 Jami al Islamiyah
which was completely ruined.
And nobody worried. Their mother was a little
bit worried about the older one.
Where is she gonna go for college? 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? No, sweetheart. 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 I 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 was 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 akhir. 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.
I 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 a 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, shiqa,
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 is 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 wanna kill you or kill
me, they target your limbs.
Why?
I didn't see this in Turkey.
I saw misery, but that's Qadarullah.
And everybody said, Qadarullah masha'afa.
But this is And it was one day.
This is not 6 months and none ending.
And everybody was saying, Move to the north.
Even that lady I was telling you about
who said, We live for the akhira. 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 very
different.
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
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
the smile on the face of this young
man.
Alhamdulillah,
Alhamdulillah.
Honestly, I did not hear, I couldn't
sit for more than 5 minutes because I
was like, You Allah,
You Allah, you know the Sahaba story we
hear about and we say, you know, Abdullah
ibn Arwaha,
and we say, Really?
These are these people. He's smiling, his wife
next to him, alhamdulillah,
alive, alhamdulillah, alhamdulillah.
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.
I understand.
Grant them victory
and hope 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 what
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.
Assalamu alaikum Allah.
Allah Subhana Wa Ta'la give them victory, and
Allah Subhana 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 ta'ala
next time we'll get to be with you,
insha'Allah ta'ala.
One
day.
Nothing is impossible for Allah.
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