“What Motivated You To Go To Gaza To Help People?”

Dr. Khaled Dawas is a British surgeon who graduated from Cambridge and is currently working at University College London. He spent two weeks in Gaza saving lives. We had the great privilege of interviewing him briefly on Friday, 26th July 2024 directly after a conference on Gaza and journalism that took place during the Annual Convention of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community (Jalsa Salana UK 2024). What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the interview.

What motivated you to become a surgeon and help people?

I think medicine is a combination of things. There’s got to be a wish to have an altruistic aspect to your life and not just have a job that’s gonna pay you wonderful salaries for the rest of your life. It’s a combination of wanting something challenging, something which deals with people and also has expansion, the ability to evolve. I mean my career as a surgeon I’ve… you go through different phases of your career where you evolve from being a junior doctor to a trainee to a consultant and that evolution keeps it interesting, it’s an interesting career to have.

Did you always know you wanted to go into medicine or did you gradually realise you wanted to become a surgeon?

I think a lot of medical students will tell you that they probably feel it earlier on and now I look at some of the students we have and usually with good accuracy I can guess who has a surgical personality and who doesn’t, so I do think there is an element of personality about it and for me it came early, I enjoyed surgery from early on.

What motivated you to go to Gaza to help people?

Like many people watching what’s happening from the outside, it felt to me like a desperate situation which I wanted to help with and I was lucky enough to have skills which can be used to help and I was lucky enough to be able to get into Gaza and I do feel very privileged and lucky to be able to do that and therefore as soon as the opportunity arose, I jumped on it, I didn’t have a second thought about it at all.

When you were dealing with patients, did you see that religion helped them in any way to cope with the pain?

I think faith is important for a lot of people. In Gaza, faith is a very important thing. I have Muslim friends and Christian friends, some of them I grew up with. Some of my Christian friends contacted me from the US to say that their relatives were in St. Porphyrius Church which was hit by the Israelis very early on and they were stuck there, some of the members of their family were killed, for them faith is very important.

When I go and talk to Muslim Gazans, their faith and their ability to talk about destiny is very important, it does give them strength. There’s got to be a belief that there’s some bigger force beyond us and there is justice. Maybe we have no justice on Earth but they hope — we all hope — there is justice beyond.