Medicine amidst genocide in Gaza: An interview with Bilal Irfan
The World Socialist Web Site interviews Bilal Irfan, who says he works with FAJR Scientific, about health care in Gaza in late 2024, FAJR’s missions and the injury research its teams are documenting.
The World Socialist Web Site interviewed Bilal Irfan, then a master’s student in bioethics at Harvard Medical School, about health care in Gaza in late 2024. WSWS says Irfan works with FAJR Scientific. He states that the views in the interview are his own and not those of any organization he has been involved with.
Asked what FAJR does, Irfan describes a nonprofit medical NGO, established in 2019, that sends medical missions to poorly resourced places. He says its leadership is predominantly Palestinian. He lists a mission to Gaza in August 2023 and a smaller one to the West Bank earlier that year. He also names emergency missions to Gaza in April, May, June, July and October 2024, and emergency missions to the West Bank and Lebanon. He says the work includes training local staff and involving them in research, and mentions a plan he calls “Fifty in Five”, meant to move Gaza’s health care system ahead 50 years in five.
Irfan says medical teams were being refused entry to Gaza more often after the Rafah operation in May. He also says the number of patients leaving Gaza for treatment fell from about 50 a day before May to 200 in total since. On research, he says FAJR is documenting the injuries its physicians and visiting doctors see, and that studies on orthopedic trauma are going through peer review.
For FAJR, the interview is one outside account of what its missions involved in 2024 and the obstacles they met.
Read the full interview on the World Socialist Web Site. The site refers to the organization as FAJR Scientific.
