In May 2025, Dr Mohammed Mustafa sat down with AMUST to give his direct experience treating Gazans injured by the Israeli genocide.
AMUST: Please tell us a bit about your background.
Dr Mohammed Mustafa: I am a doctor that works and currently resides in Perth. I’m an emergency physician trainee. I grew up in the UK and I was educated in the UK as well. I went to medical school there.
I was actually born on Makkah in Saudi Arabia, but my family originates from Palestine. My mum is from the West Bank and my dad is from Gaza.
What motivated you to go to Gaza?
A lot of things motivated me to go to Gaza. I mean, obviously, there’s a connection there that I have to the place. But, I think, the overriding thing was just the humanity of what was going on.
There’s been almost two years people have just been watching on their screens, over and over again, children women die in the most horrible ways and I just thought that I had to at least be there to try and help. A lot of risks and a lot of planning. It was a long process to go.
When did you travel there?
So I went in on 11 March and I got back on 11 April 2025. This was the second time. The first time I went was in June last year (2024).
What was your impression and what did you see different from the last time?
The first time that I went, we were at the height of the war and one of the big factors then was the starvation. There was a lot of starvation.
The first time that I went, there were lot of kids with malnutrition. There were many jaundice cases from Hepatitis A and dirty water. There were a lot of accidents as well, a lot of children who were run over by aid trucks.
The second time that I went, I arrived during the ceasefire. When the ceasefire broke a lot of the things that we saw was just obviously the injuries from the missile strikes. So people burnt alive, bodies shredded.
It was a lot more destructive this time: the force of the bombs and the injuries that we would have on people, most of them wouldn’t survive, whereas in June (2024) people were surviving.
What about the environment that you worked in?
The first time when we were there, the environment, we were very, very poor resourced. We were using sutures that weren’t suitable for humans. It actually said on the packaging, “not suitable for humans.” But we felt a little bit safer in the hospitals.
This time around, there was no real safety, not even in the hospitals, the bombs were going off all around us all the time. The hospital areas around the hospital were getting bombed. Sometimes the hospital itself was bombed.
There was a lot of tension this time around because we just didn’t know when the missiles were going to hit and if they were going to hit whether we’re going to hit the hospital, because there were hospitals that were bombed when we were there. The hospital that I was in was bombed when we were there.
In the North, the lack of equipment and medical supplies in the hospitals was huge. We didn’t even have ventilators in the emergency room. So it was that it was a very difficult, very challenging environment.
How did it affect you as a person, psychologically?
For a lot of people, there were a lot of times when we would cry, especially at night. There were a lot of times when things were just difficult. It was actually a lot of times when we would cry in the emergency department itself, by the things that we saw.
Since coming back, I’ve been campaigning and I’ve been travelling around and doing a lot of interviews and I think that’s probably been the thing that has helped me the most just to cope. But, I’m being told that in the future, you know, things might trigger me in the future and I might need more support then.
For now I’m putting all of my energy and my hope is on trying to do something positive outside of Gaza for the people in Gaza.
But when you see children bleed to death on the floor every day and you’re seeing people die in some of the most brutal painful ways, it’s very, very hard to not let that affect you.
Do you have any messages for Muslims here in Australia who might want to help in some way or do something.
There’s so many ways in which you can help: you can write to your local MPs and put pressure from that point of view. You can boycott, who can donate to reputable charities. You can make du’a.
I think the thing to remember is just don’t turn away, don’t turn them away from the TV screens, don’t switch off. A lot of people, because it’s been more on for so long, have a bit of Gaza fatigue where they just turn off.
But when you are there in Gaza, it’s real, these people are real people and it’s real children dying and it’s real families being told apart and that’s what we’ve got to remember: we can’t forget about them because just us remembering them is a powerful reminder that we’ve stood with.
You’re engagement was facilitated through Palestinian Australian New Zealand Medical Association (PANZMA). Can you tell us how they supported this activity?
PANZMA co-ordinate to get you placed on the bus to get you there. They have somebody who will look after you whilst you’re in the hospital.
They will ensure any admin things are done, including any living issues are taken care of.
Then obviously there’s always that coordination with outside of Gaza if anything happens. They coordinate with the World Health Organisation about where you are placed.
Do you have a message for the Australian government and the Australian public generally?
This is something that’s going to affect us all. You know it might not affect us right now but it’s something that will affect us in the future. This is creating a lot of deep-seated tension in the Middle East and all around the world. And I think if we push it to one side it’s only going to come back one day.
We all need to figure out a way to bring back the humanity to this situation, to think about people that are suffering there and how best we can help them and how best we can alleviate the suffering from one of probably the worst atrocities in the world right now. So I think we all need to be an united on this for the sake of hose children in Gaza.
Have members of you family been affected?
Yes, but I try not to make it about me or my family. I try to focus on the children, focus on their lives and focusing on the humanity of these people.
This is not something that affects one individual, it’s something that affects loads of people and you don’t have to have family there to have a stake in Gaza. We’re all one community.
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