“I challenge Netanyahu to show proof that Al Shifa Hospital is a Hamas hideout”: Dr Mads Gilbert

Dr Mads Gilbert is a veteran Norwegian physician in the NORWAC (Norwegian Aid Committee) emergency team for Gaza. He has worked with the Palestinians for nearly 45 years as a specialist in emergency medicine and anesthesiology. He was in Lebanon in 1982 when the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) invaded southern Lebanon. He was in Gaza, too, offering emergency medical services during Israeli bombardments of 2006, 2009, 2012, and 2014.

He speaks to me from his hotel room in Cairo, Egypt, where he is waiting for an opportunity to enter Gaza through the Rafah border crossing to join and assist Palestinian healthcare workers who are faced with a dire situation and whose hospitals are hanging by a thread in the face of the weeks-long IDF onslaught.

Seventy-six-year-old Dr Mads Gilbert, popularly known as Dr Mads, tells me that the current attack on Palestinians is the worst he has seen in his lifetime. “Mind you, I was in Beirut in 1982. I thought that would be my worst experience. I was in Gaza in at least four previous bombings. Every time I thought it could not get worse. But this attack on Gaza, I think, is the most dramatic, and the most vicious bombing we have seen in modern history,” he tells me in this interview.

“This is by far the worst, the most brutal, the most extensive, and the most lethal attack that I have seen in my 45 years working with the Palestinians and their healthcare system,” he says.

Dr Mads challenges Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to put forward the evidence to support the IDF claim that hospitals in Gaza are part of the terror infrastructure of Hamas — the organisation that is in power in the Israeli-occupied region — which launched surprise attacks on Israel on October 7, killing 1400 people, many of them civilians.

While he condemns any attack on civilians on both sides, Dr Mads says that he has been working in the Al Shifa Hospital on and off for several years adhering to international laws, and would not have worked there if he had any proof that it was being used for terrorist purposes.

“I have been walking freely all around. I have taken pictures all over the hospital and filmed patients and incidents. Nobody has ever stopped me from taking photos. Nor have my movements in the hospital been restricted. For 16 years, I have walked around freely inside the hospital complex. We have heard these claims since 2009 and they have been threatening to bomb Al Shifa since then without offering any proof,” he says.

He says that the world supports Ukraine because it is being oppressed, but the West is ignoring the Palestinians who have been victims of oppression for decades. “Remember there are 2.3 million people in Gaza of which half are children. They are incarcerated in this ghetto. They have been like this for the past 16 years. Now the Israelis are bombing the habitats, parks, villages, apartments, and their cities. So far more than 8000 people have been killed of which more than 3,300 are children,” he rues.

Dr Mads says that Palestinians are the most oppressed people of the post-World War II period. He commends their intelligence and the ability for improvisation with very few resources. He calls the West to seek accountability from Israel for targeting hospitals, including cancer hospitals, and meticulously targeting civilians in the name of combating Hamas.  

Dr Mads and his small team of emergency health workers left for Gaza from Norway three weeks ago. “Unfortunately, Rafah has been completely sealed off as part of the Israeli siege of Gaza. So it has not been possible to get in. Neither do water, electricity, and medicines get into Gaza, which is a disaster,” he says in the video.

The award-winning physician and author of two books, Night in Gaza and Eyes in Gaza, urges people around the world to follow their moral compass. “Don’t just keep watching the slaughter. Stand up and voice your concerns,” he says, adding, “My appeal to world leaders is: check the facts. Check the international law books and stop this immediately. Tomorrow it will be too late. This is an industrial-scale mass murder.”