The war in Gaza started nearly two years ago in October 2023 and since then, 50,000 children have been killed or wounded. Many of them are stranded in Gaza.
The Kent, Ohio-based nonprofit HEAL Palestine has helped more than 60 children leave the war zone to receive live-saving care. Four of those patients are getting treatment right here in Columbus, three other in Cleveland.
WOSU's Renee Fox spoke with co-founder Dr. Zeena Salman on Monday.
Dr. Zeena Salman: I'm Dr. Zeena Salman and I'm a pediatric oncologist and I'm one of the co-founders of HEAL Palestine.
Renee Fox: Could you tell me what inspired you to found HEAL Palestine?
Dr. Zeena Salman: Yeah, absolutely. So I've been a pediatrician building up cancer care capacity in Gaza for the last 10 years. I've actually been to Gaza many, many times over the last decade. We all saw what happened in October of 2023, and essentially a couple of months into what is now clearly, I mean what has been for some time clearly a genocide. But a couple of months in, I think we started to note that this was different from previous offenses is on Gaza. That the situation was much worse than ever before and that the needs were greater than ever before. And so myself, as well as three other co-founders, all of whom have had a long legacy of work in Palestine and particularly in Gaza, decided that we needed to start a new nonprofit, a grassroots organization that could really harness the power of communities that really wanted to do good in a time of so much need and tragedy.
Renee Fox: Thank you, and can you tell me about HEAL Palestine's work?
Dr. Zeena Salman: So, right now we have evacuated to date 62 children out of Gaza with many of their family members for a total of 150 evacuees to date, and these are injured children, many of whom are children with amputations because we have the largest, now, population of children and amputations in modern history.
So, children who've lost legs and are going to have to come to the U.S. and have surgery sometime and get prosthetics and learn how to walk again, but also kids who were not necessarily injured directly in Gaza, but actually were kids who have indirect effects of this, by which I mean, kids who maybe need access to different medical or surgical treatments, but the health care system has been completely destroyed in Gaza, and so they don't have access to that care.
So all these kids, we locate free care for them in the United States, and that includes Rahaf, who just arrived in Columbus yesterday, as well as other children who have come to Ohio. So we have now four kids who have been treated in Columbus, Ohio, as well as three others in Cleveland for a total of seven in the state.
Renee Fox: What types of treatments are they receiving here and in Cleveland?
Dr. Zeena Salman: Again, many of them are children with amputations, getting prosthetics, undergoing surgeries, orthopedic surgeries. One needed a prosthetic eye. She lost her eye in Gaza. And the majority of them are injured children. We even have with us a 20-year-old young woman who was volunteering with HEAL Palestine with one of our food distributions that we were doing on the ground when she was actually hurt and entered by the Israeli and lost her leg and so she's also here getting a prosthetic and learning to walk again.
Renee Fox: I can't imagine the horrors that she and the children and their families have lived through. What is their experience like when they're in Ohio?
Dr. Zeena Salman: I mean, Gaza has been under blockade for a long time. So the majority of these families have actually never left Gaza before because they've never been allowed to leave. Some of these, the majority, them actually didn't even have passports until we worked on their evacuations and had to obtain passports from them from the West Bank. So when they get here, this is certainly a foreign land for them and not only a foreign land, but the land that actually enables the country that enables. This should have had to take place in Gaza, right? We're the ones who send our hard-earned tax money and send weapons and bombs to Gaza to bomb there and hurt innocent children. And so a lot of times they're fearful about coming to the U. S. Part of what we do in addition to matching these children to hospitals that are going to provide them with free care is also to build communities in those areas that can really take these families in and make them feel warm and loved and help them to heal again.
Renee Fox: What can people in the U.S., or Ohio do who want to make a difference?
Dr. Zeena Salman: Every city that has a hospital that a child is being treated at, we have what we call a healing community. Whether that's Cleveland, Columbus, Boston, San Francisco, or Orlando, or anywhere in between, we have healing communities of really dedicated volunteers. And these are people who essentially get up and watch the news each day and feel helpless and think, I need to do something positive in such a terrible time. And so they volunteer with us, they help coordinate families' care, they might host them in their own homes, they may drive them to appointments, take them out on the weekends for social events, host a meal train for them, so many different opportunities that there are for these families to be made to feel welcomed and loved and to not fear the U.S. as they otherwise could.
You can join a community in which you can help care for these children, whether it's financial support, whether it's emotional support, or whether it is taking them out, taking them shopping, because when they leave Gaza, they're not allowed to take anything with them at all, so we buy them all new belongings among so many other things. There's so many ways that you can support these families directly.
At the same time, I think it's important for us to say enough is enough. And I think its important for people to hold their congressmen accountable, to call their local politicians, and to say, 'I'm an American, I pay tax money and this is not where I want it to go. I intend for it to stay in America and to serve America, but not to pay for bombs. I stand against violence, especially against children. I stand again blockading of aid and starving children in Gaza, I will not be a part of this process, and I demand an end to this. I demand a ceasefire, I demand the entry of aid into the blockade, into the Gaza Strip.'
And I think our collective voices can be so powerful. So I think that's an important thing that every American should feel not only able but compelled to do in these difficult times. I think we have to stand up, and that's how all the world atrocities have ended one way or another. With people rising up against these terrible situations.
Renee Fox: How difficult is it to get people out of there right now? It sounds like it must be pretty difficult.
Dr. Zeena Salman: It's incredibly challenging to conduct a medical evacuation and to get these kids and their families out. Some of the kids that we've gotten out, and yesterday we got out eight out of the 11 children with their accompanying family members of the largest evacuation from Washington, United States. And some of the kids that arrived yesterday, we had been working on their evacuations for a year, an entire year. You could be a child in Gaza who's lost their leg, it has presented to a doctor, to a surgeon, what have you, gotten all the appropriate medical documents, and then it still takes a year to be able to be accepted by a hospital in the United States, present that documentation, get all the relevant approvals from the Israeli security system, from the Jordanians, which is where they have transit through and visa, the visa process in the U.S.
It's an incredibly slow process to kind of be able to check off all those boxes and so we're so grateful that we're able to get these kids here these 11 and the 51 prior to that. That being said there's still tens of thousands of children in Gaza who are injured who are starving who are at risk every day of bombing shooting starvation and we we really need a greater solution we wish that the evacuation system as well as we've done with it didn't have to exist. That these kids could have the same human rights of safety, access to food and healthcare and shelter that everyone else deserves.
Renee Fox: So what happen with these kids when their treatment is over? Will they go back to Gaza, will they be in danger again?
Dr. Zeena Salman: That's a great question. We obviously could never send a child after treating them, after healing them, whether that's medical care, mental health care, the education, all the different interventions that we provide for our holistic approach. There's no way you could send a child back into a genocide. It wouldn't make any sense.
So we send our kids to Egypt, so that they're right across the border, the closest possible location for these kids to be to their families, and also a place where they can continue to be under Heal Palestine support. So in Egypt, we provide them with housing, living stipend, schooling, and continuation of any medical needs, physical therapy, mental health therapy, what have you. So we maintain a long-term holistic vision for the support of these kids and their families.
Renee Fox: Oh that's inspiring, it's good to hear. Is there anything that we haven't talked about that you think people should know?
Dr. Zeena Salman: That's a good question. I mean, I think the main thing is that we can't feel hopeless in these times. We can't afford to. We have to stand up and be strong in a situation like this because those children, they need us. So it is our responsibility to stand-up, to advocate, to volunteer, to donate, to do everything that's within our power to ease the situation. It's, at the end of the day, up to governments, and the government's probably making different decisions than what the people would want. And that's why it's our role as people, as human beings, to stand up against this in all of those ways to try to make a difference.
Renee Fox: Well, thank you so much, doctor. I really appreciate the work that you're doing.
Dr. Zeena Salman: Thank you so much, Renee. It's good to talk to you. Thanks for shedding light on this.
The interview has been edited for time.
