Thread by @yipengGe

I am currently on my way back to Canada. There continue to be significant delays for humanitarian healthcare workers to enter and exit Gaza through the Karem Abu Salem border crossing. There is no reliable humanitarian corridor for aid and medical supplies to enter the Gaza Strip. The Rafah border crossing remains closed.

It is now 8 months of overt genocide on the background of 17 years of blockade on the Gaza Strip restricting movement of people including aid and food, and 76 years of the ongoing Nakba - the forced displacement, ethnic cleansing, and genocide of Palestinians from their traditional homelands.

Despite the intention of entering Gaza for humanitarian healthcare work, the continued delays for a reliable humanitarian corridor due to Israel’s occupation of the Rafah border crossing and Israel’s poor faith management of the Karem Abu Salem border crossing have created the conditions for ongoing delays to enter and an unclear timeline for exiting and rotation of team members.

I spent the past two and a half weeks in Cairo, Egypt. I had the privilege to meet and befriend many amazing and beautiful people working on mutual aid efforts to support Palestinians who have been displaced and are seeking safety or medical care or both outside the Gaza Strip. The needs are so vast and overwhelming.

Some of the amazing and beautiful people who I met were Palestinian doctors and medical students from Gaza. Hearing their stories of caring for patients and their community during this genocide, despite all their own personal circumstances from being displaced, was profoundly inspiring and hopeful.

They are the best of the us. They are the epitome of the highest moral and ethical commitment to humanity as medical professionals. I am so grateful to call them my respected colleagues and friends. They give me strength. They give me hope.

We also shared laughs and joyous moments together, and these memories I will carry for me forever forward as we must nourish and sustain ourselves as we continue to demand an end to this genocide, and support the necessary movement for liberation and self-determination of Palestinian people on their traditional homelands.

We spoke of the student encampments and protestors demanding divestment from genocide and apartheid - a vast majority of people commit to and demand for humanity to prevail. For Palestine to win. This will happen. We must not waver in our solidarity and collective efforts.

There is an ongoing ground invasion of Rafah that has already forcibly displaced over 800,000 people and put all hospitals in Rafah out of operation. Massacres continue to occur killing people and children living in designated ‘safe’ zones.

Multiple mass graves around hospitals have been recovered. Medical supplies and medications are so desperately depleted and healthcare workers beyond exhausted.

The primary care clinic in Rafah I personally worked at earlier this year is now non-operational and being used as a morgue to store dead bodies from the massacres.

We are at a pivotal moment that demands our unwavering solidarity for the Palestinian people and their struggle for liberation and self-determination through resistance.

Palestine will be free from structural oppression. We will learn from the issue of Palestine to dismantle the systems of oppression that affect peoples and communities around the world.