After bearing witness to crimes against humanity, I could not vote for the starvation and killing of Palestinians

This past week, U.S. citizens had an opportunity to vote for their next president. After my recent visit to Palestine, and having been intimately involved in working with Palestinian colleagues on the ground facing the horrors and sheer brutality of the Israeli regime on a daily basis, I found that I simply could not bring myself to vote for those who have supported, aided, and abetted the ongoing crimes against humanity and genocide. 

Any view expressed herein is my own and not reflective of any organization I have been involved with.

In my role as a medical researcher, volunteer staff, and educator working on issues affecting underserved communities, Palestine was a natural calling as I watched a genocide unfold through the screen of my phone. This work brought me to the West Bank last summer, where even as Gaza dominates the news, and for good reason, given the genocidal violence perpetrated against its population, the situation in the occupied West Bank has escalated dramatically from the pre-October 2023, ‘routine’ levels of apartheid. The sheer scale of brutality and unpredictability is a cornerstone of Palestinian life. 

During my time in the West Bank I witnessed Palestinians being harassed while walking down a street, a soldier pulling a child aside and burning a cigarette into his arms, or being molested and sexually abused in unique and creative manners, publicly. This was often accompanied with the gleeful and joyous expressions of the soldier or settler perpetrating the crime — some form or another of a violation of the core tenets of one’s basic human dignity — and this is just to pass from one street to another. Denial of entry, rejections, and being moved at gunpoint from one place to another, or being threatened to be shot, or actually shot at, have become such routine occurrences, even for foreign nationals who may appear as ‘Palestinian’, i.e of Arab or Muslim origin, or racialized as such. 

This was the context in which I have worked with Palestinian high school students, medical students, nurses physicians, and educational administrators across Gaza and the West Bank, and continue to support them both remotely. Their safety is of paramount importance to me, and thus I feel compelled to write in broad sketches. So many young people, including and namely children, have shared their hopes, desires, and dreams with me – be it attending a foreign school, getting a postdoc, completing their medical education, or even seeing the sight of an open sea and swimming in it without fear of an airstrike or gunshot. Every day I am sent pictures from their tents, their hospitals, the cases they see with orthopedic fractures laced with infection, gunshot and blast wounds, and severely malnourished children dying as a consequence of compromised immune systems. 

And this is to say nothing of the horrors I have heard from medical colleagues in northern Gaza during this last month of the genocide.

Medical staff, especially those from the Kamal Adwan and Indonensian hospitals, over the last few weeks have been pleading with me to share their news with the world and coordinate media attention, sending me what they believe to be their last texts, desires, dreams, and hopes. They give me their well-wishes, their hope to see my face in the afterlife, and ask for my forgiveness for any wrong they may have done. In reality, they are the ones who we have utterly failed and whose forgiveness we should be seeking.

In one instance, while I was coordinating with journalists and media outlets to bring attention to the crisis in the hospitals of northern Gaza, a nurse repeatedly apologized to me in the belief that her statement about the hospital rationing the little food available would be perceived as a critique of the relief and humanitarian agencies working to provide access. She feared that the little aid allowed in, as they starved for water and a morsel of bread for days amid the siege of the hospitals in northern Gaza, may be rescinded for appearing as ‘ungrateful’. Others like Dr. Hussam Abu Safiyeh, the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, sends videos recording a daily update of his staff’s situation, finding the courage to do so for his patients’ sake even when his own son has just been killed.

One constant type of message I receive from my colleagues in Gaza are WhatsApp voice notes with no words but just the sound of overhead buzzing drones filling the night sky. It is a constant reminder of the psychological toll inflicted daily on Palestinians. If it is not their home being destroyed, their family members, abducted, raped, killed, tortured, shot at, starved, besieged, or bombed, there is still an underlying sound to drive the sanity out. Sleep deprivation is just one among many of the medical conditions that have taken hold in Gaza. Some of the doctors try to crack jokes to me about having undiagnosed ‘insomnia’, or being ‘infection-experts’ having survived so many respiratory conditions over the last year. 

Visiting medical teams and local staff work on cases with such gruesome orthopedic trauma that one does not even know what they are looking at at times. The post-fracture infection rates are high, and the wound presents in such a complex fashion it may be difficult to even know the series of strikes or gunshots that led to the case manifestation seen in a hospital. This is if they even make it to a hospital. Many times children, women, and elderly men come in lower droves to a hospital following an airstrike due to many of the more vulnerable populations dying on impact. They are thus not even seen by a clinical team to even be operated on, let alone recorded or tallied, and their bodies, or what’s left of them, can be scarred beyond recognition.

Another factor that is less talked about is the impact this has on patients with pre-existing conditions such as dementia or cancer. Many are dying from otherwise preventable causes due to a lack of basic medications. Mothers are carrying pregnancies without anesthetics, undergoing miscarriages from the sheer trauma of an airstrike. The smallest of wounds may lead to lethal infections with disease running rampant, and overcrowding in the remaining hospitals can be a death sentence.

So many carry wounds to their hearts that are beyond description. I am shy to even ask sometimes how many of their loved ones have been slaughtered or abducted, be it in Gaza or the West Bank. Some share their stories willingly, others look at me and tell me ‘you are more Palestinian than us’, or that they would give me their hawiyehs (Palestinian identity card) due to my passion for their cause. And yet I must painfully remind them, I am still American. They caution me to be safe with my words as they are used to the brutal repercussions for even ‘liking’ a social media post, let alone writing or speaking out. But I must remind them again, I am still American. 

Where on the ballot of the 2024 U.S. presidential election could I have voiced this opinion to effect material change? I am not sure there was an easy answer, and yet increasingly it became clear the choice was not in Kamala Harris. The Biden-Harris administration chose to cling faithfully and unwaveringly to their support for Israeli policies, being unwilling or unable to depart in even the slightest manner, even symbolically for electoral purposes, from this pledged support. No amount of protest, polling, and pleas seem to have induced a shift in foreign policy, and it is with this in mind that I cast my vote on November 5. I could not bring myself to vote for the starvation and rape of my friends, Palestinian healthcare workers and children.