Doctor Raised in EL Travels to Gaza to Care for War Victims
Content warning: This story contains descriptions of severe injuries that may disturb some readers.
Dr. Omar Malas went into medicine because he wanted to care for people who are sick and in need of help.
An anesthesiologist at Ohio’s Promedica Toledo Hospital, Malas’ job is to alleviate pain. After watching the suffering that has unfolded in Gaza Strip during the war between Hamas and Israel, Malas traveled to aid perhaps the most vulnerable population on the planet.
Malas had no real connection to Palestine. He grew up in East Lansing, graduated from its high school, and his parents still live here now. But that didn’t stop him from boarding a plane early this year to care for Palestinians caught in the middle of the war.
“I am Muslim,” he said in an interview with ELi, “so, you know, I share faith with many people who are there in Gaza. [But] I’m Syrian. My parents were born and raised in Syria. I was born and raised in the U.S. My Arabic is a little bit spotty, but good enough to get by.”
Malas arrived in Jordan on Jan. 7 and was escorted by a United Nations and Israel Defense Forces convoy into the southern tip of Gaza at Karem Abu Salem before traveling north on Jan. 9 into the besieged area of the territory. He and his group – 13 doctors and nurses including six surgeons, two anesthesiologists, and a pediatrician – would spend the next three weeks at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital and General Services Hospital in northern Gaza.
He was part of a medical mission with Rahma Worldwide, a humanitarian organization headquartered in Beverly Hills, Michigan. Malas said he was motivated to go because Rahma Worldwide is one of the few organizations able to operate in northern Gaza, where he said the need was the greatest.
“I’m an anesthesiologist,” he said, “so most of my work was done in the operating room. You know, we had the unique fortune of being able to see Gaza before the ceasefire deal and then we were there when that ceasefire deal went into effect and then the period of time afterward. So before the ceasefire deal went into effect, we would hear the mass casualty alarms go off. So essentially, a bomb would hit somewhere nearby. They would bring any of the injured civilians to our hospitals. Typically, it’d be like 30 to 40 at a time.
“They would kind of come into the emergency department all at once. They would triage them to see who are the people who are just too sick and not, you know, unfortunately just wouldn’t be able to allocate resources to them because we weren’t expecting them to survive.”
The medical team saw two to three mass casualty events each day, Malas said. Patients were directed to hospitals, in part, depending on the specialty doctors at the hospital practiced. The hospital he was at dealt primarily with neurosurgical traumas.
Malas was aware of the horrors unfolding in the region. But he wasn’t expecting to see the amount of harm being inflicted on children.
“I did a case of an eight-month-old that had a tracheal injury and esophageal injury from shrapnel,” he said. “I did cases of three and four year olds who had shrapnel injuries to stomach [and] liver with heavy, significant bleeding internally requiring massive resuscitation so that was something I was not expecting.”
One of Malas’ toughest cases, he said, was a 30-year-old woman who had experienced significant shrapnel injuries, causing a “peeling off of her face,” he said.
“It requires three different surgeons working in tandem, all of them that came with us on the medical mission to help try to perform a facial reconstruction…and repair an eyeball that had been ruptured.”
Even after the ceasefire went into effect on Jan. 19, Malas and his team were still seeing traumatic injuries regularly. Unexploded bombs and shells went off as the residents of Gaza slowly made their way back to their homes.
“[In one case], there happened to be an unexploded ordnance that was underneath the flooring,” he said. “When they stepped [on it], it ended up exploding in the house. It killed multiple different members of the family and three of them were in critical condition, but came up to us in the operating room and we took care of them.”
With the goals of his mission, Malas had little time to explore the world outside of the hospitals.
“Before the ceasefire,” he said, “the instructions were very clear…the safest place for us was to be in the hospital, to never leave. So basically we spend 24 hours a day the entire time just in the hospital. And then afterward, we had a little bit of a chance to go and see some of the areas in Gaza.
“We got to go basically as far north as you can, to see the destruction that was, you know, in Beit Hanoun and the Al-Saftawi region. It’s hard to describe…if you imagine every single building is bombed out. There isn’t a single piece of infrastructure that has survived unscathed. The best case scenario is the building is missing its windows. Worst case scenario, it’s basically like flattened or collapsed on itself.”
Malas saw residents returning to their communities, coming back from the south to try and repair what was left of their homes. He was inspired by the strength of the Palestinian people in the face of the destruction.
“It was really exciting to see how resilient they are and they can still try to live life and try to make the most of their situation despite how grave it is,” he said.
The doctor remarked that his team had something akin to celebrity status in the area, with residents offering gifts and food, despite their own limited resources.
When time came to return home, the team ran into obstacle after obstacle.
“It was supposed to be a two-week mission,” he said. “The challenging part from a security perspective is trying to get us out of the north. The north was a spot that had the worst of the bombardment, the siege of that area, limitation of medical supplies, getting in food.”
When the IDF and Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) attempted to get the team out, three days in a row they were unlucky. It took nearly a week to extract the medical professionals and on the day they left, a civilian pathway into the northern corridor was also opened to move residents back into their homes.
“We were the only bus that was moving backwards against traffic on this one lane dirt highway back to the south to be able then to exit Gaza,” he said.
Malas no longer lives in East Lansing, but he still speaks warmly of his hometown.
“I did my whole K through 12 education at East Lansing Public Schools,” he said. “Some of my earliest mentors were some of the teachers at East Lansing High School. Ms. Mueller, Ms. Anderson, Mr. Plough, Mr. Brandenburg, these iconic figures from when I was there.”
While Malas works today at Promedica Toledo Hospital, his parents are still in East Lansing and his father is a physician at Sparrow Hospital.
Malas is happy to be home but his thoughts remain with his patients in Gaza.
“There are many healthcare workers that have either been killed or imprisoned during the course of the war,” he said. “From a public health perspective, there’s still a ton of work that needs to be done. There’s still trash piled up in areas because of limited ability to move it. There’s still areas where infrastructure has been destroyed, where sewage is running in the streets.
“I highly encourage anyone who has an interest in helping people who are in a really difficult situation to try and look up any of the organizations that go there. Many of them do a really, really nice job. Even if it’s just, you know, making prayer for those people that are there.”