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Feb. 17, 2024 - Jim Fetzer
53:48
Dr. Yasser Khan with Basil Valentine - Eyewitness to Gaza Genocide - 17 February, 2024
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Patrick Henningsen and TNT.
And welcome to the Patrick Henningsen Show today, Friday the 16th of February 2024.
I am Basil Valentine, in for Patrick today and quite possibly next week as well.
He is in Acapulco, where they have problems with the Internet.
So I am reliably informed.
Anyway, we've got a fascinating programme for you today.
In a few minutes, I will be joined by Dr Yasser Khan, a real life hero.
He is a Canadian surgeon who has just returned from Gaza, where he has witnessed some of the most horrific scenes imaginable.
You're going to need a strong stomach for this one.
But we don't shy away from the truth here on TNT and bringing you information that the corporate media would rather was not in the public domain, lest it influence people's opinions about events in the Middle East.
Also today, of course, most of the oxygen in the newsroom is taken up by the untimely death of Alexei Navalny, the Russian dissident.
The UK Foreign Secretary David Cameron has predictably chimed in with a condemnation of Russia, saying that Vladimir Putin should be held accountable for Alexei Navalny's death.
I wonder if he feels the same way about Rishi Sunak, Benjamin Netanyahu, Joe Biden, and the scores of thousands of deaths in Gaza.
Probably not.
Anyway, he said the Russian state under Putin fabricated charges, poisoned him and sent him to an Arctic penal colony.
Navalny fought bravely against corruption, says Cameron.
Putin's Russia fabricated charges.
Putin should be held accountable for what has happened.
No one should doubt the dreadful nature of his regime.
Interesting that Navalny's death coincides, of course, with the Munich Security Conference.
Where heads of government and particularly defence ministers are gathering to plot the next steps towards World War Three or whatever else they've got in mind for us all.
For his part, Rishi Sunak said Navalny had demonstrated incredible courage and Secretary of State Tony Blinken has said the reports of Navalny's death underscored the weakness and rot at the heart Vladimir Putin's Russia.
The death, of course, comes after Tucker Carlson's visits to Russia last week, which seemed to portray anything other than weakness and rot.
So, very interesting that he's died at this time.
Russian state television announced that he died after feeling unwell following a walk.
That's all they've said.
He was 47.
Simple fact is I have absolutely no idea how he died, but obviously at the age of 47 it is a premature death.
There are lots of those at the moment, aren't there?
So I have no wish to speculate in conspiracy theories.
Michael McCaul, the Republican Chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said of Navalny, I hope that out of his death will come something to send a message to the world and to the American people about who Mr Putin really is, not to have this charm offensive that Putin is somehow a misunderstood man.
His intentions are very clear to me.
As a traditional national security conservative, McCaul is at odds with MAGA Republicans loyal to Donald Trump, who The Guardian describes as a Putin admirer, and who follow media figures like Tucker Carlson, whose softball interview broadcast from Russia together with his visit to a Russian supermarket gave a rosy depiction of Russian life.
Well, I don't see that there's anything wrong with a rosy depiction of Russian life, If Russian life is indeed rosy, it obviously wasn't very rosy for Mr Navalny, but I don't think Tucker's point was to get into the machinations of the Putin regime and who was in and out of favour.
I mean, the Russians have always dealt, shall we say, harshly?
with internal critics.
That was the case under the Soviets.
But it certainly didn't stop us engaging in détente.
And it was the détente of the 1970s and 80s that brought about the disarmament treaties that briefly in the 1990s looked like we might be living in a more peaceful and just world.
But of course, events have unfortunately taken more than one dark turn since then.
Without further ado now, I'd like to bring on to the stage Dr. Khan, who joins us from Toronto.
I'm extremely grateful to you for giving up your time, Dr. Khan.
I know how busy you are, particularly this afternoon, so welcome to today's news talk.
Thank you for having me on.
I'll be honest with you, Dr. Khan, I wasn't particularly looking forward to this afternoon's interview.
Please don't take that personally, but I know you have been in Arguably, you know, the most challenging situations.
imaginable by a human being, witnessing the most horrific scenes imaginable that we all hoped and believed we would not be seeing in the third decade of the 21st century in Gaza, particularly since these scenes are not the result of a natural disaster but are entirely avoidable and the result of aggression by the Israeli regime.
So please fill us in first of all on Where you've been, how you came to have this relationship with Palestine, and then please feel free to tell us exactly what you've been doing.
Well, I'm not.
Thank you very much for the opportunity.
I'm not Palestinian, but like many of us, like billions around the world, we've been following this, you know, live streamed mass killing of a civilian population for the last, you know, it's hard to say five months now.
I used to say three months.
I said two months.
I said three months.
Now it's five months.
And And you know, we've all watched, this is the first sort of, you know, whatever you want to call it, plausible genocide as the ICG calls it, or actual genocide.
Whatever the case may be, it's the first live-stream genocide that we've seen, that I can remember, live-streamed.
Most other events have occurred, you know, we found out how bad it was after it was all over.
This has been live every day.
And so, I think I've been a lifelong humanitarian.
I've operated in about 40 different countries in the world in a humanitarian fashion.
I've taught surgery, done surgery, set up programs everywhere from Africa, Asia to to South America as well.
And so it's just what I do.
And it comes natural to me.
I've never been in a really, really active war zone of this kind that was Gaza.
And spontaneously at the scrub sink at the hospital where I work at, a surgeon approached me and the opportunity opened up.
And I was surprised.
This is in December.
And I said, well, I didn't think they're letting people in.
And he says, well, you know what, they are now.
And it's taken us months and months to organizes, but do you want to come?
And I immediately said yes, instinctively.
I said, you know what, I'll say yes now, and then I'll go home and talk to my family and decide, but I can't say no.
He goes, okay, well, you know what, I need your medical degree, I need your passport, and I need your blood type, just in case.
And so I had that all on my phone.
Actually, blood type I actually didn't have.
I just guessed on what my blood type is.
It's A, B, or O. And I just guessed something.
I don't even know what my blood type is, believe it or not.
And I gave it to him.
And the rest is... And basically through a number of obstacles, I was able to make it through Cairo.
I flew to Cairo from... I reside in Toronto, Canada.
I flew from Cairo... I flew to Cairo.
And from Cairo, I went to the Sinai Desert to the Rafah border.
and entered Gaza from there.
And that's how this whole humanitarian episode happened.
And I went with a group of about seven or eight surgeons of different kinds.
So there's orthopedic surgery, neurosurgery, you know, general surgery and things like that.
And we all went together as a group.
And when was this?
When did you first arrive in Gaza?
Yes, sir.
This was basically arriving at, we arrived just before New Year's, so I left December 30th and arrived December 31st and then I entered Gaza and I was there till about January 9th or so.
Okay, so three months of solid bombing One of a better expression.
Had already taken place and much of Gaza was already leveled and thousands were already killed and mutilated by then.
I mean, you know, I must say, I've seen a lot, like I said, in a lot of places, but I mean, it was just, I always say, it was basically hell on earth.
The scenes I saw, I went right into Khan Yunus, so I went from the Rafah border, I drove at night.
That's the only time, to be honest, that I feared for my life because that's when the Israeli forces will bomb you, any car driving at night.
So nobody travels after 4 or 5 p.m.
So these two guys from the NGO, which is connected to the WHO and the local health officials in Gaza, they picked me up in a car that wasn't an ambulance.
And I said, are you sure it's safe?
They go, yeah, yeah, it's safe.
Just trust.
And you know, Palestinians have a lot of trust in God.
They go, just trust God, just trust Allah and it'll be okay.
So, you know, I took a leap of faith.
I said, fine.
So, I drove down and it was 20 minutes of driving in the night.
There's no other car on the road.
It was quiet.
And I've never been more relieved to see the emergency sign of a hospital because that's what I knew that we'd arrived at the European Hospital in Khan Yunis, where at that point in time, the battle was happening quite actively.
The Israeli Army was about a kilometer away from the hospital and Rafa at this point in time was not being bombed.
It was supposed to be the safe space, is what the Israeli Army called it at that time.
And I'll tell you one thing, that everything I say right now, I want you to imagine it being now ten times worse, right?
Because I was there over three weeks ago and it's now much worse, right?
So magnify everything by ten times, basically.
And the first when I arrived, the first thing I noticed was this 24-hour humming of drones, right?
So the Israeli forces have these drones of all kinds in the air 24 hours.
So that's what they live with.
They live with this humming noise 24 hours and it was deafening almost.
And these are spy drones, but many of them are also what they call the quadcopter drone, which is a weaponized drone that does the sniper firing and kills people kind of mobily.
And people actually feared that.
They didn't fear the spy drone, but they could tell the difference, I can't, between a quadcopter drone and And, you know, a spy drone.
And so that was there.
The other thing I noticed when I arrived was the bombing.
There's bombs, whether it's a tank bomb or whether it's a missile dropping almost every few hours at that point in time.
And you could hear it.
And it felt like it's right next door to you because it would drop and the whole ground would shake.
The whole hospital structure would shake and you would feel it in your body.
And that was my first experience when I arrived.
The hospital itself has been turned at that point, and it's probably worse now, into a refugee camp.
Many of these people have been displaced five or six times already because Israel keeps on saying that's a safe zone.
Then they bomb the safe zone, which makes no logical sense in this day and age when a modern army of a modern state, especially if it's a third or fourth Most powerful army in the world, okay, tells you there's a safe space somewhere, go there and then start bombing that safe space.
Or they sniper fire with drones or whatever, people going to that, migrating to that safe space.
That makes no sense in the world.
Like, what kind of logical, moral army would do that?
It makes no sense to me.
I mean, I've never heard about that before, at least in my lifetime, that I've been on this earth for and the history that I've studied.
But I'm not a historian.
I'm only a humanitarian and a physician.
I can only say what I saw and what I witnessed.
So, what I witnessed was the whole hospital, which is a modern hospital built with European Union funding.
Very well built, mind you.
Very well.
I was very impressed.
I could look past the chaos and appreciate that it must have been a very well built hospital in its day.
you know, and it's day before October 7th, right?
Now it's a refugee camp.
There's over 20,000 at that point.
Now there's probably more, 20,000 people living in these makeshift shelters inside and outside the hospital.
And there's no tents.
You know, there's only, you know, bedsheets and blankets and makeshift shelters because people think that they're relatively safe in here.
Even though, as we know, in this war on Gaza, even the hospitals have not been safe, right?
They've even attacked hospitals and evacuated hospitals and bombed it and sniper fired and all this kind of stuff.
So we know that even hospitals, but they feel it is safe.
And, you know, if you're lucky, you got a mat.
If you're not lucky, you get a carpet.
If you're even less lucky, you get a sheet, a bed sheet.
And if you're really unlucky, you get the ground.
And it was when I was there at that point in time, it was one to two degrees.
Right.
You know, which is very cold.
It's very cold.
People don't think of it as being cold in the Middle East at all.
No, it's very cold.
And that part of the whole region, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Palestine, all that area has the seasons.
They have four seasons, right?
They have fall and winter and summer and spring.
It's not like Saudi Arabia or the Gulf where there's two seasons or one season, basically.
And so I mean, you know, and it rains and this puddle, so you're basically sleeping in a puddle of mud, right?
And now these are all people that had homes, right?
So they're homeless, right?
They all had homes.
And One thing that people don't sometimes think about and I realized when speaking to the Palestinians when I was on the ground is that for a longest time the siege on Gaza is not since October 7th.
It's been there for decades and not even since 2007.
It's been there for decades and decades.
They've lived in this concentration camp where everything that comes in and goes out is monitored and controlled.
And sometimes the Israeli authorities will kind of just arbitrarily say, well, you know what?
For example, Parsley, for some reason, is... Is there a break?
Yes, there's a break.
I'm Basil Valentine.
Great to have you with us, Dr. Khan.
We'll be right back after this short break with the network.
TNT's Darren Denslow.
And another reason that the BBC get claimed was TB.
It's the badgers!
That's why farmers are protesting across Europe and now the fishermen and the firemen and everybody else seems to be jumping on board of this Europe-wide protest.
But here the BBC are saying it's all to do with tuberculosis and badgers.
Quite interesting.
But there were a whole trade of farmer stories that have been published by the BBC over the weekend when they had actually been remaining silent for the last six weeks.
In fact, it goes back into 2023 when the Dutch originally came out to protest.
Dig in deeper with D.D.
Denslow on today's news talk, TNT.
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Today's news talk radio, TNT.
And welcome back to the Patrick Henningsen Show, with me Basil Valentine in for Patrick.
And I want to go straight back to Dr Khan.
Dr Khan, we were in the hospital.
It's freezing.
People are lying on the floor and anywhere they possibly can to try and get some rest.
20,000 people crammed into the hospital and it's environs.
Please continue with your monologue.
Um, yeah, so horrible situation.
I mean, there is one bathroom for 200 people.
So you can imagine, you know, how bad it is.
And like I said, I mean, as I said before, these are not homeless people, they had homes.
And because of this decades, decades long, not since October 7 siege by Israel on these people of Gaza.
I mean they lived in a concentration camp but even then they made the best of it.
They couldn't easily move out of it because everything that goes in and goes out is controlled very tightly by the Israeli authorities.
So they put everything into their homes.
Their homes were their castle, where their life was everything, right?
And now basically most of their homes, 85-90% of their homes have been destroyed.
Even once they've evacuated, the Israeli army has gone.
And you know, this is not stuff you can make up.
I'm not making this up.
You have to go to TikTok and see all the videos that the Israeli forces and soldiers post.
Right?
And these are empty homes that are just being detonated and whole neighborhoods are being detonated and destroyed even though the people have already left.
There's nobody there.
There's no threat.
There's nothing.
So what's the real agenda here?
One should always ask.
Why is everything?
So about 80 to 90% of the civilization has been wiped out and flattened.
Everything from their history, museums, their archives, schools, universities, medical schools, infrastructures, sewage pipes, water pipes, the entire healthcare system, everything has been destroyed.
So reason I say this is that it tells you that the tragedy that these people are dealing with.
And now to come and live like this was really hard for me to see.
It was.
And when you go inside the hospital, again, there's thousands of people who've made shelters in the hospital.
The hospital had about 250 beds.
Now it has about 1,500 at the time.
Now there must be thousands as all the other hospitals have been shut down or destroyed.
There must be thousands now, there now, but at that time, there's about 1,500 patients, 1,000 to 1,500 patients.
And basically, there's no beds.
So you see patients with major orthopedic injuries with metal rods sticking out from their legs because of surgery, lying on the floor, mostly a young population.
Mostly children.
Mostly people under 18.
Lying there with these rods from their arms and their legs and just in pain.
Everything is being blockaded and controlled by Israel.
What comes in, what doesn't come out.
There's hardly any pain medications.
There's no antibiotics, you know, or hardly any.
So these people are getting infected because they're in unsterile conditions.
So if the initial bombing didn't get the leg or amputate the leg, basically the infection will, because in order to save their lives when it gets infected, you have to cut the limb off.
So either it's the arm, the foot, the hand, the legs are cut off.
You know, the rate of amputations, I mean, I saw in just one day, I saw about 15 amputations, 15 in one day, both legs, one arm, one foot, one hand.
And in a young population, I mean, I'm an eye plastic surgeon, so I took 10 eyes out because they're shattered by shrapnel.
I repaired multiple eye injuries because the shrapnel gets into the eyes because In an explosive situation, basically you don't go like this.
You don't cover your face because you don't know what's happening.
In fact, you open your eyes because it's the fight or flight response that nature or God has given us.
So their eyes are wide open and they get shrapnel all over their face, in their bodies, everywhere, but also in their eyes.
So I saw shrapnel ripped the eyes out of as young as a two-year-old.
I did a two-year-old.
I did a six-year-old.
I did a 10 or 11-year-old.
I did a 14-year-old, 16-year-old, right?
I mean, innocent children who have now been scarred for life.
And that's just in my time there, right, Basil?
I mean, that's just my time, which is a short time.
This has been going on for them every day.
So, you know, when people question the numbers and say, well, that's too much, or we don't believe those numbers of people injured or maimed, well, that's BS, because in just a short time, I, with my own eyes, witnessed hundreds.
That's just me, one experience, right?
You know, so it's bogus.
It's preposterous.
But even by that argument, as a humanitarian, I asked them, I said, well, okay, you know what?
Fine.
Forget this.
What number do you think is right?
100?
Is 100 children dead good enough for you?
Or, sorry, justified?
Okay, even if it's one child, is that justified?
Right?
So, you know, it was horrible.
And what would happen, Basil, is that I was there and when the bombs would go off, the local emergency doctors and nurses, by the way, who all spoke English, many of them spoke English.
They're very educated.
I think something like 95% literacy rate in the Gaza Strip, which is amazing.
Now all their schools are destroyed and bombed, you know, and all their culture is gone.
But anyways, you know what?
Wait.
Wait 15 minutes and the mass casualties will start coming in.
And that's where I saw the most horrific scenes that I never want to experience ever again in my entire life.
That's when I saw, because indeed they did come in.
They came in in huge numbers.
I mean, they came in with a mother holding, images now flash to my mind, mother holding her eight, nine year old son, screaming in the mass chaos, screaming, you know, for someone to check his pulse.
He was cold and dead.
And skinny, like they're all skinny.
I mean, all these children have been starved.
So there's like bones protruding, like there's no fat on them at all.
And that's a characteristic of all kids.
I mean, they're starving because, again, food has been blockaded from both the Rafah border and also the border on the Israeli side.
And they're not letting food in, in sufficient quantities that's needed.
And so people are starving to death, like literally they're dying because of starvation.
So all these kids are thin and she's screaming and running around and the baby, sorry, the child is cold and dead.
I mean, you know, if I can describe to you the mass chaos of what I saw when a bomb occurs.
Right.
There's people on the there.
There are people on the floor.
Everybody's screaming.
People are covered with dust and rubble because homes there are made out of stone.
Here, unlike in Canada, where they're made out of wood because, you know, of the weather.
But but they're all covered with rubble.
There's shrapnel all over.
There's limbs dangling off arms and legs.
And people are screaming that there's babies and children on the floor with major head trauma being ignored because there's so much chaos.
There's there is doctors suturing what they could without anesthesia on the ground because there's no beds.
And there's people with with with that.
I saw with with with abdominal injuries that I went through medical school on the floor.
I'm not a general surgeon, but I've never seen before horrific abdominal.
I mean, I don't want to describe the injuries and what was coming out of those injuries.
You know, and that was a mass scene and that was basically just in my short time there.
They're facing this every day and it's worse now, right?
It was Terrific!
Not enough supplies, not enough gauze, not enough antibiotics.
Often because the antibiotics were not there, they had these children and people with soft tissue injuries, you know, and they had to douse it with alcohol.
So then, what would happen is that, and especially, I mean, having, you know, having kids, I mean, that's what got to me the most, is that you have these young girls and boys eight, nine years old, they have a huge soft tissue injury, and they're dousing with alcohol to sterilize it, it doesn't get infected so that they don't have to lose the limb.
And the child is screaming, because if you can imagine, if you get alcohol on a cut, you know, it's painful, right?
Like when you disinfect the cut.
But they're just dousing it, this massive wound taking over half the leg down to the bone, and they're kind of dousing with alcohol to just cleanse it, and then put a bandage across it so that it doesn't get infected, and the limb is not lost, right?
So those are scenes that I saw that will live with me for a long time, and that I just don't ever want to see again.
Yeah.
Yeah, of course.
And all civilians, these casualties.
This is, of course, what's worth remembering.
And as far as the Israelis are concerned, there is nobody innocent in Gaza at all.
In fact, I've heard Israeli spokesmen say just in the last 24 hours that everybody over the age of four deserves to be starved.
The shortage of supplies is deliberate.
Even so-called moderates in the Israeli regime like Benny Gantz are saying that humanitarian aid should be blocked.
And there are parties, festivals of dancing Israelis at the border crossings.
doing everything they can to prevent aid from reaching Palestinians.
One spokesman had the audacity to say, we didn't supply Germany with humanitarian aid in the Second World War, so why should we supply Palestine?
You know, people talk about an impending humanitarian disaster should Rafa be attacked, but the disaster has already happened, even if the atrocities and the onslaught stops now.
This is the most egregious war crime of our lifetimes by a long, long way.
And yet Netanyahu only today has been pushing back hard against the U.S. vision for after the war and its cause for a Palestinian state.
I mean, it just absolutely beggars belief, Dr. Khan.
Well, you know, it has been a humanitarian crisis from the beginning.
And And you're right.
I mean, the bizarre thing, Basil, about this whole conflict is that the Israeli government and Israeli army has not hidden anything.
Like they've openly, which is really bizarre, they've openly made these statements that the ICJ, the International Court of Justice said have genocidal intent.
They actually, many of these statements, the mild ones, At the ICJ hearing, they listed these statements that they made.
So it's bizarre that their own government makes these statements of no aid.
We're going to starve them.
They're all animals.
We're going to wipe Gaza out.
We're going to kill everybody.
Everybody is in Hamas.
We have to kill women and children because it's all right.
It's justified.
The politicians have made these statements in the hundreds of statements.
Ministers and the Prime Minister.
Everybody's made these statements.
It's bizarre.
I've never encountered this where another army and government will make these statements that clearly calls out for wiping out a population and starving them to death.
And it's all on record.
So that's been really bizarre.
From a physician point of view, this has been an onslaught and intentional destruction of the healthcare system.
It's been a methodical, thought out, intentional destruction of the healthcare system to basically facilitate a plausible genocide.
And they basically, many of the hospitals if not most of the hospitals have been destroyed by either bombs or they've been detonated or they've been forced to be evacuated because people are still getting injured all over Gaza.
Some of the doctors and health care workers have tried to repopulate the hospitals after they've been abandoned with no power but you have to treat the patients somewhere, right?
I was on the ground and people spoke to me and doctors spoke to me and I saw things.
So no one can argue that, you know, I experienced this and I got this right from people on the ground.
You know, in that as doctors try and enter, you know, these hospitals, these drones come and they're shot at by sniper fire and they're killed.
Right.
It's to prevent them from repopulating the hospitals.
They've also bombed the sewage pipes and the water drinking water pipes.
They know that many of these 2000 pound dumb bombs that are weapons of mass destruction are not going to get the tunnels.
But they will get the infrastructure.
And so you get sewage water mixing with drinking water.
These people already don't have any water coming in, right?
So they have to drink toilet water because otherwise they'll die.
I mean, when you're desperate of thirst, you'll drink anything.
And so disease is rampant.
I mean, cholera and typhoid is not far away if not already there.
Hepatitis A, because they also are living in very cramped quarters, is rampant is epidemic, something like 2000% increase in gastrointestinal diarrheal illnesses.
So, you know, the other thing I will say is that there's about 10 to 15,000, probably more bodies under the rubble, right?
So now it's raining season in Gaza.
So all these bodies are, you know, the rainwater is leaching bacteria into the water system and all around where they are.
So people are getting sick.
So the bombs are not going to kill you.
Disease will 100%.
And they know this.
One of their politicians called for epidemic.
He actually made an open statement.
It's bizarre that we want them to go by epidemics.
Like, who says that in this world?
What kind of human being says that?
I don't understand.
Anyways, having said that, there's no antibiotics.
They're malnourished.
So they know that if you're malnourished, your immune system is weakened.
So you'll get sick.
You don't have the antibiotics.
And so the whole idea is that if we wipe out From what I was told in my discussions, if we wipe out the healthcare system, then there'll be nothing to return to.
Right?
So the sick, in order to get treatment, will have to leave the Gaza Strip.
Because we want nothing there.
And that's essentially what they've done.
They have basically completely destroyed the healthcare system in every aspect.
From the cause of disease, to the treatment of disease, to the actual facilities that treat the disease.
We're going to take another short break now.
Thank you very much Dr Eunice.
We'll be right back in two minutes to look at what happens next with Egypt apparently preparing a refugee camp in the Sinai Desert.
We'll be right back.
De-weaponizing weather with reality and perspective.
Well, we had the Super Bowl yesterday, and interestingly enough, people were bragging about the idea that the Super Bowl was powered by solar panels.
Now, this is very, very interesting, since the Super Bowl was at night, and you really can't store solar panel electricity, so how is that happening?
Now let's say there was some miraculous way we did store some of that energy from the solar panels during the day.
By the way, there's been a lot of clouds around Las Vegas lately.
In fact, it snowed south of Tucson.
How do you like that for climate change?
But let's say we could store that.
How much of the Super Bowl was actually powered by those solar panels?
This is typical of what goes on with these people.
They make claims, they're unsubstantiated, they don't back it up, and if they do back it up, They don't give anyone a chance to actually look at the details of it.
But that's typical of what's going on.
As far as the result of the Super Bowl, I wasn't really paying attention because I was looking at the weather.
You know why?
Because I enjoy the weather.
It's the only weather I've got.
This is TNT climate and weather watchdog meteorologist Joe Bastardi and I already told you what you could do with the weather.
I often forget to mention that he's an amputee because Abel will try any activity he can.
My arm helps me with basically everything.
He doesn't see what he can't do, he sees what he can do.
Yeah, this is helping.
The War Amps has just given him the ability to do all the activities every kid can do.
When you donate to the War Amps, you help kids like me.
Thank you!
Patrick Henningsen Talks on today's News Talk Radio TNT.
Welcome back to the programme with me, Basil Valentine.
In for Patrick today, Friday the 16th of February.
Filippo Grandi, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, said today that an exodus of Palestinians into Egypt must be avoided at all costs.
I'm delighted to say I'm joined by Dr Yasser Khan, Dr. Khan, this is ethnic cleansing, isn't it?
If the Palestinians leave Gaza, this is another war crime under international law to go with the genocide.
Well, you know, I can comment on the attack on the health care system and the killing of doctors and health care workers and destruction.
And that definitely is a war crime under international law.
But as we've seen, no war crime is sacrosanct.
It doesn't matter what the crime, what the Israeli army has shown is really that they don't have, from what they've shown, the evidence is there, They don't have any constraints when it comes to that.
Just the healthcare system alone, forget everything else of their civilization which has been destroyed.
Just destruction of the healthcare system alone and pushing it out is a way of ethnic cleansing.
I don't know what other term to use.
There's no other term to use really.
It is ethnic cleansing because you're basically cleansing a population That there's nothing.
You destroy everything.
If they're sick, they have to leave.
There's nothing else.
There's nowhere else to go.
It's all rubble, right?
Did you have to destroy all the hospitals?
You know, a hundred of them.
Did you have to destroy all the clinics?
Did you have to kill those doctors?
Did you have to destroy the infrastructure completely?
And did you have to destroy the residential buildings and houses once people have left them?
Well, we know the answer.
Absolutely not.
And that's why it's genocide.
It's as simple as that.
Who can remember back in October when a bomb went off in the courtyard of a hospital, the Armenian Christian Hospital, I think it was.
And there were these denials.
Israelis said, oh, no, this was Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad fighting back and their rocket exploded and killed all these people.
Here we are, four months later, and as you say, every single health facility in the Gaza Strip has either been completely destroyed 100% or is functioning on a life support system?
I mean, it's very difficult to get up-to-date reports about what is actually functioning, but we know that the Nassau Hospital in Cairn Eunice was invaded within the last 24 hours.
At least four patients in intensive care died because their oxygen supply was cut off.
That was the last Reasonably functioning hospital in the entire strip.
Where do we go to from here?
The pictures are just absolutely apocalyptic.
And as you say, the Israelis have created hell on earth in Gaza, which they've been very open about their intentions to do.
They've really been very open that this is a vindictive series of assaults, that they regard the Palestinians as subhuman, human animals, they've described them as, and that the whole of Gaza should indeed be reduced to rubble and its population entirely displaced.
Yet we still hear these Awfully meek statements from Western leaders.
This is, for me, as a Brit, a European, citizen of a NATO country, powerful country, the complicity of our leaders in this genocide, up to and including today, even now, with all this carnage, they still can't bring themselves to call for a ceasefire because, you know, Hamas!
Did you see any Hamas fighters?
Earlier you said when you were at the European Hospital in Cairn Eunice the battle was about a kilometre away.
A battle implies there are two sides fighting.
Were you aware of the fighting or was it simply a case of endless aerial bombardments, bombs and sniper fire?
One-way traffic in other words.
In my experience, it was just endless bombs and endless missiles being dropped.
You know, me personally, just to give an example, the patients that I personally treated were all children.
I don't, I'm trying to think back, I don't think I treated anybody over 17, right?
Anywhere from 2 to 17, personally, right?
Most of the people coming in were children I didn't see a single gunshot wound when I was there in my time and they're all explosive injuries.
that's the people that I saw, that's people that I treated.
I didn't see a gunshot wound.
Okay.
And I didn't see a single gunshot wound when I was there in my time.
And they're all explosive injuries.
They're all rubble falling on top of you or explosive injuries, basically.
And, you know, and I mean, I agree.
The viciousness and efficiency of Israel, the killing machine that they unleashed on the people of Gaza, is really unprecedented.
I mean, the weapons that they've used, many of them that they've not used before, from what the local doctors told me, that they've never seen these type of injuries before.
They have these special drones.
One drone is called a Hellfire drone that implodes, fires off all these discs, that if it doesn't kill you, it causes these very strange amputations.
that if it doesn't kill you, it causes these very strange amputations.
Most amputations occur at the joint, like the knee or the elbow.
Most amputations occur at the joint, like the knee or the elbow.
These are above thigh or mid-thigh, mid-arm amputations.
These are above thigh or mid-thigh, mid-arm amputations.
And they have all these other missiles at the fire that the Palestinian doctors told me had these strange shrapnel injuries.
And they have all these other missiles at the fire that the Palestinian doctors told me had these strange shrapnel injuries.
When they explode, they don't kill.
They will basically fire off shrapnel.
They have these other missiles that when they explode, they kill by incineration, by burning.
And so the amount of burns that they've seen, the kind that they've never seen before, they believe that because of Israel's strong defense industry, if a weapon is battle-tested, it has a higher value when you sell it to whoever wants to buy it.
That's what they kind of were talking about.
And because they saw injuries that they've never seen before, and they've been around for a long time, really severe, horrific injuries.
And I saw them too, and they pointed this out.
Look, this is like a groin amputation, or it's an above knee, mid-thigh.
This is because of this, that, the other, right?
That's what they told me.
And these are like a six-year-old, like a six-year-old, which is horrific, horrific to see.
So we need an immediate ceasefire.
Somebody has to stop this.
Somewhere along the line there has to be someone internationally, there has to be enough international pressure to stop this.
But to be honest, Basil, even if there was a complete ceasefire now, today, thousands will still die.
Right.
And because because the number of amputations that I've seen, bad amputations, you know, are still there.
Disease is killing them rapidly.
So even if we stop today, thousands will still die.
So we have to stop and let all humanitarian aid come into the Gaza Strip without impediment.
Let all the antibiotics come in.
Because if we ethnically cleanse them into the Sinai Desert, there's nothing there.
It's another concentration camp.
And the Palestinians themselves are, to them, Even to the doctors.
That's where the doctors will stay.
Many of them are Irish citizens.
They're Ukrainian citizens.
They're Russian citizens.
I mean, they've got citizenship through marriage or through birth or whatever.
And they can leave, but they don't leave.
The doctors stay.
And because to them, you know, their resistance is survival of the healthcare system is a form of resistance to them.
Survival alone, staying alive is a form of resistance to them.
And they will stay alive and keep people alive no matter what, even if it's hopeless.
Yes, I'd be grateful if you could tell our viewers and listeners a little bit more about the nature and character of the Palestinian people because Western media invariably likes to either ignore them, ignore their voices, or sort of tar them all with some brush of terrorism, or sort of generally being an awkward squad with an unpleasant religion, and so on and so forth.
So please tell us about your experience of the Palestinian people themselves.
I've had the honor and privilege of meeting a lot of people in this world with all the travel that I've done and all the humanitarian work that I've done.
I'll tell you that they are, without a doubt, the most resilient, generous, steadfast people of faith that I've ever met in my entire life.
I mean, they were generous and kind-hearted, educated, thoughtful, and very introspective about what's going on.
And they welcomed me and all the others.
I mean, there was a British group of doctors that were with me at the same time that I was there.
And they welcomed us.
And even though they don't have a lot of food, they fed us well.
It was simple food, but they fed us well.
And just wonderful people.
They're not animals.
They're just basically one of the British doctors that I went with, you know, a wonderful man.
I don't know where he's from in the UK.
He was there at the same time.
He went with a different group and he's been a lifetime humanitarian for about 30 years and he's worked in really bad war zones from Iraq to Syria to Yemen and whatever.
A wonderful man and he made an interesting comment.
He's done this longer than I have and he said that this is the only place in the world that's being de-developed.
Every other country or place in the world is being developed.
They're being de-developed because there's such a resourceful, intelligent civilization that's advanced despite being in a concentration camp.
They're actually actively being de-developed, which is nowhere in his experience that he's seen.
And that was a very revealing and thoughtful comment to me.
I said, you are right, because they're advanced, but every infrastructure, their poets, their artists, Their philosophers, their sub-specialist doctors were all targeted and killed by the Israeli forces in this war.
And journalists have been targeted and killed in this war like no other battle ever in the history that we know of in such a concentrated manner.
So, just wonderful, intelligent people that don't deserve this, that deserve freedom, they deserve dignity, and they deserve their right to live independently, make decisions for themselves with dignity.
And so, I don't know what is going to happen.
There's a lot of things happening in the background.
I'm not a politician, nor, you know, I just, from a humanitarian point of view, this has to stop.
I don't know how many people it's enough.
Is losing a million people enough?
Is losing 200,000 people enough?
I don't know what the number is.
200,000 people enough?
Like, I don't know what the number is.
It's a really bad stain on humanity that we've come to this level where we've dehumanized a whole group of people, right?
I don't want to get philosophical, but if you look at the West, we're all colonizing powers.
In Canada, in the U.S., we colonize the indigenous people in our land.
Right?
Who are the indigenous natives?
And we're all colonized by people that came from Europe and then later on.
And so we're a victim of that.
And the UK and France and Germany and Belgium, Spain, all these countries have done that.
And you do that by dehumanizing a population.
Right, and I'm glad you brought that point up because they're wonderful people, just like you and I. And also, Palestinians, I'll tell you, there's Palestinian Christians, Palestinian Muslims, and there's Palestinian Jews who are living in Israel, right?
So, and people, I mean, I saw Palestinians who were in front of me, blonde and blue-eyed, too very dark.
So, it's a I mean they're people just like you and I. I mean they would fit right well in the UK with its diverse multi-ethnic population because they all look diverse, right?
You have all ranges of colors and hair colors and eye colors and whatever, right?
It's like they're normal people like you and I who are now seeing their civilization being destroyed.
Well, it's coming to the UK that some of the Israeli extremists want.
They want to turn the entire population of Gaza into refugees.
One positive development today, pro-Palestinian activists have filed criminal charges against Volker Beck, a former member of the German parliament.
The solidarity groups Palestine Speaks and Jewish Voice for Just Peace in the Middle East are holding him accountable for genocide.
The Germans, of course, bizarrely have been amongst Israel's staunchest supporters at the International Court of Justice.
We can only hope that justice We'll prevail.
I would imagine that South Africa's actions at the ICJ, although not conclusive, not yet anyway, provided some hope.
For the Palestinians because I fear that suicide is starting to creep in and you know for all their resilience There's only so much people can take I heard one very sad quote from a little girl earlier this week She said she wanted to stay in Gaza now more than ever because she hates the whole world for what it has allowed to happen to people and
People talk about, you know, the Second World War, horrors that were going on, nobody knew what was going on, so on and so forth.
Nobody can make that claim now.
For me this is the clearest moral divide between people who basically have a sense of common humanity and the avoidance of suffering And those who, for entirely spurious and phony reasons, seem to glory in the bloodbath.
That's the only way I can put it.
Dr Khan, over to you.
We've got to go two minutes more.
The floor is yours.
I mean, Yes, we have to find some positivity in all of this and hope.
I have hope in the billions of people who have spoken out for humanity against this basic genocide that's been committed on a wonderful beautiful group of people, an innocent group of people with women and children and men.
I think I'm hopeful with that, like in the world's response.
Also, you know, I'm hopeful in the sense that the Palestinian people are very, very resilient.
And so I hope that this is over soon and that they can return back.
And then I think they will need the whole world to help them rebuild their society.
So when this is over, if this is over, they'll need the whole world to help them rebuild their society.
And I think we should all be ready to help them.
Indeed, I couldn't agree with you more.
We should all help them to the fullest extent we possibly can.
Dr Khan, I can't thank you enough for joining us today.
Dr Yasir Khan.
We'll be right back with Christian James and latest from the UK after the headlines.
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