Two doctors with ties to Gaza — Rajaie Batniji ’03 M.A. ’03, a resident physician at the Stanford Medical Center, and Mohammad Subeh ’06 M.A. ’06 M.S. ’07, an emergency room physician — urged students to recognize and combat the dehumanization of Palestinians in a Wednesday speaker event.

Event organizers’ edits on graphic images in Subeh’s presentation drew accusations of censorship among the audience.

During the event, titled “Understanding the Humanitarian Crises in Gaza and Lebanon,” the two doctors cautioned that framing the Israel-Gaza war solely as a “humanitarian crisis” risks stripping the “moral crisis” of the urgency it demands. The event, held at Encina Hall and attended by around 40 students and faculty, was sponsored by the Program on Arab Reform and Development and moderated by political science professor Lisa Blaydes. 

Subeh, an emergency surgeon and traumatologist, has served several medical missions to Gaza and recently returned from a mission in Lebanon. In addition to his “difficult” journey to pass Israeli blockades, he explained that all humanitarian activity within Gaza must receive approval from Israeli authorities. Often, Subeh said, he would have to wait for 45 minutes to get the green light to travel to another field hospital. 

“Not only do they know the time of your movement, but the vehicle you’re taking, who’s going to be in the vehicle with you and which route you’re going to take,” Subeh said. 

Subeh said he recalled asking himself, “How can this be happening on Earth in 2024?” 

Subeh’s presentation included several photos of his patients in Gaza, most of which were edited by the event organizers to blur over explicit wounds. Subeh said that he believed the blurred images “sanitize the discussion.” When asked why images were modified, Blaydes clarified that they were blurred to protect minors in “end of life situations” and to avoid breaching consent. 

Alexander Key, an audience member and associate professor of comparative literature, said he thinks that people feel like the blurring of graphic images is “censorship.” He said by censoring images, people become “more sensitive” to the nature of the photos. 

Subeh said that through his duty as a physician and through his religious practices as a Muslim, he was able to realize that, ultimately, “we are all human beings” who experience the “happiness of life” and “the pain of loss” in the same way. He said that the world’s failure to humanize Palestinians is why this war continues. Subeh called dehumanization a “protective mechanism,” but said it is a “privilege” to turn off our phones or blur a picture. 

Subeh also tackled in detail the traumas his patients experienced. Subeh said that Israeli soldiers would place explosives in trashed canned food containers, anticipating that starving Palestinians would search through the garbage for food to eat. One of his patients was left with completely mutilated hands from a hidden explosive. In another instance, Subeh said he witnessed a young boy take his final breaths as his sister stood over him, shrieking. 

Batniji said that people find it “too uncomfortable” to think about the war as a moral crisis that “allows for ethnic cleansing, apartheid and genocide.” He urged students to remember, whether viewing the conflict from a humanitarian, public health or moral perspective, to think critically.

Batniji, who is also an entrepreneur and political scientist, was born in Gaza and began his presentation by telling audience members that in the past year, over 65 of his family members, mostly children, have been murdered. 

“The numbers can be numbing,” Batnijie said, referring to the over 43,000 people in Gaza dead, as reported by Aljazeera. To make the statistics more palpable to the audience, Batniji said that the death count in Gaza since Oct. 7, 2023 is roughly the same as the number of all Stanford undergraduates in the past 21 years.  

Batniji extended this parallel to Israel’s use of starvation as a “weapon of war.” He said that about 1.5 million people in Gaza are confined to an area roughly the size of the rectangle between Stanford, San Francisco International Airport and the 280 freeway. Under Israeli blockade, these people are intentionally deprived of food, humanitarian personnel and medical supplies, he said.

During the Q&A session, GSB professor Anat Admati, who is Israeli, spoke to the presenters about the pain felt by Israelis as a result of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack. She said that the Israeli population is not a monolith and that there are also many Israelis calling for an end to the war. Admati ended her thoughts with a question: “How will we solve this problem if we don’t talk to each other?”

Subeh responded that though it is important not to “paint a wide brush on a population,” history and existent power dynamics should not be neglected and that international humanitarian law should be upheld.  

Batniji cautioned that creating a “one for one” comparison of Palestinian and Israeli suffering is a “dangerous and misleading trap.” He added that processes of truth-finding, reconciliation and reparations could be a starting point to peaceful coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians. 

Key said that while political conversations like this one can be “painful,” they are “important and powerful.” 

Hesham Sallam, a professor and the associate director of the Program on Arab Reform and Development, wrote in an email to The Daily after the event that the talk highlighted “how imperative it is to elevate and center perspectives from the ground in these discussions.”

“It demonstrates that we at Stanford have what it takes to hold these difficult conversations in a manner that is respectful and that defers to the power of persuasion, the power of ideas, and the power of evidence-based reasoning,” Sallam wrote.