A cry of the heart

Overwhelmed, distraught, touched and compelled by the stories and images from Gaza, Canadian Mennonite reporter Madalene Arias has interviewed many people—Palestinians and Jews—she found through various connections and means. Below are interviews with two people Arias has spoken with recently. We share this as a cry of the heart and a prayer for mercy. – Eds.

Ahmed Kouta
Nursing on the run in Gaza

Ahmed Kouta is a 23-year-old

Palestinian-Canadian who arrived in Gaza three weeks before the October 7 Hamas attack and has remained there for the duration of Israel’s bombardment.

Growing up in Canada, he and his family would frequently travel to Gaza. He went there to complete his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in nursing, returning in September to defend his thesis.

“Plans have changed,” he said, speaking with Canadian Mennonite via Instagram voice notes on November 28 during the temporary truce. The truce gave him time to find a stable internet connection and respond to message requests.

After the attacks, Kouta was called to work in the emergency unit at Al-Shifa hospital, the largest medical complex in Gaza.

“We were looking after everyone,” he said, “but most of the people that were coming in were children.”

Kouta said he witnessed a total of four attacks while serving at Al-Shifa, located in Gaza City. On November 10, the Israel Defense Forces surrounded Al-Shifa and forced an evacuation.

“I was lucky,” says Kouta, explaining that his shift had ended just before the siege, and he was gone for the day.

Kouta has since moved north of Gaza City, while his family members have remained in the south.

With Al-Shifa closed, and no other hospital in the area where he was located, many people approached Kouta for help once they learned he is a nurse. When he spoke with Canadian Mennonite, he was spending five to six hours a day walking to different households to treat people with burns, fractures and other wounds.

Like many of those who survive bombardment, Kouta also spends his time looking for survivors or human remains buried under the rubble.

“By the time it’s 4 or 5 o’clock, the sun is out,” he says. At night, the noise of war makes sleep nearly impossible.

“Most of the time, during the day, I’ll be doing stuff to get myself tired so that at night I can fall asleep,” he says.

Using his phone, he takes pictures and videos documenting the destruction of Gaza, so that when he has a stable internet connection, he can share what he captures online. He has nearly 250,000 followers on Instagram, where he goes by Prince Kouta.

Initially, Kouta had asked to keep his identity concealed out of fear that he would become a target. However, after Israeli attacks resumed, he published the following statement to his Instagram account on December 3: “My name is Ahmed. I am a Canadian citizen. I came to Gaza to visit and defend my thesis. My family was forced to the south while I was volunteering at the hospital. I couldn’t leave people here in the north and head south. My heart never let me. Today, we can’t help. It’s do or die. We are running for our lives, just trying to stay alive. I even registered to leave back to Canada, but my name won’t come up. I can’t even make it to the south. I cannot make it anywhere safe. I have lost hope to reunite with my family and see anyone.”

Kouta’s brother Abdel is in the south. On December 5, he published an update stating that he knew his brother was still alive but not safe.

During a glitchy live Instagram session on November 27, Kouta described how people use buckets of water to bathe when they can and then use the leftover water to wash their clothes. Since the only way to get around in Gaza is to walk, he says “finding a donkey is like finding a Mercedes.”

He says that in the most difficult moments, Palestinians remind one another: “Allah put us in this situation. Allah will get us out.”

More recently, Kouta has appeared thinner, weaker and tired.

Dr. Tarek Loubani
Enough tears

On November 25, thousands gathered on Parliament Hill for a rally organized by the Palestinian Youth Movement. Among the speakers was Dr. Tarek Loubani, a Palestinian-Canadian who was shot in both legs while treating protestors in Gaza in 2018.

He told the crowd that the day before the rally he’d watched a video of doctors treating a young girl with a head wound sustained in an airstrike. The hospital had run out of anesthesia, so doctors had to pin her arms and legs down to a bed as they sewed her wounded head.

“And I wondered to myself,” he told protestors, “Do they know that isn’t just during war? Do they know every time I was in Gaza, I sewed up children’s heads in the same way, with no anesthetic?”

Hours before, Loubani spoke to his colleagues at Al-Shifa Hospital, who had been driven out of their stations and could no longer serve their patients. He had told them he would be attending a rally in the Canadian capital. One of them asked Loubani, “Is it true that the people of Canada cry for the people of Gaza?”

“Yes!” the crowd yelled back in unison. He continued his story in Arabic, and the crowd chanted back.

In a later phone conversation with Canadian Mennonite, he recounted the words of a colleague at Al-Shifa: “We are full of tears. We want a struggle. We want anger.”

Loubani was born in a refugee camp in Kuwait and spent the first decade of his childhood in Palestine, before moving to Newfoundland with his family. He studied medicine at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia and completed his residency at McGill University in Montreal.

He has travelled back to Gaza City several times over the last decade to assist patients and train medical staff there, facing detainment and weeks of incarceration in Israel and Egypt as a result of trying to enter the city.

The message that Loubani wanted to convey at the Ottawa rally was that healthcare in Gaza has been far below Canadian standards for a long time, not just since October 7. “This is a place that was always under deep occupation, where there were always terrible things happening,” he said from his home in London, Ontario.

Loubani described the Israeli occupa- tion of Gaza as a slow massacre, one in which the method was not bombs but choking and starvation by blocking aid and denying access to medical care.

The silver lining in the current crisis is that the “slow extermination” of Palestinians has come to light. “People didn’t see it, and so it didn’t sort of inflame the popular conscience,” Loubani said.

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