Medical Humanitarian Visits: Potential and Limitations in Gaza

Omar Alnajjar is a Gazan doctor and medical intern who has worked in hospitals in Gaza since the first days of the ongoing war. He participated in the inaugural Palestine Social Medicine Course in 2023.

Professor Ilana Feldman is a cultural and historical anthropologist who works in the Middle East. Her research has focused on the Palestinian experience, both inside and outside of historic Palestine, examining practices of government, humanitarianism, policing, displacement, and citizenship. She has conducted ethnographic and archival research in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, and Egypt.

Yipeng Ge is a Chinese-Canadian and first-generation immigrant. He is a primary care doctor, also trained in public health. He received a Master of Public Health degree (Health and Social Behaviour) at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Yipeng is a board member of the Canadian Public Health Association, Canadian Doctors for Medicare, and Humanity Auxilium. He is passionate about tackling health and social inequities by addressing the social and broader determinants of health, including anti-racism and decolonizing work and practice in medical education. Yipeng has worked for various global health organizations including the World Health Organization (Headquarters) in Geneva, Switzerland, and the Population Health Research Institute in Hamilton, Ontario. In 2020, he was Canada’s official youth delegate to the 73rd World Health Assembly and the 58th Pan American Health Organization Directing Council.

Feroze Sidhwa grew up in Flint, MI. He graduated from Johns Hopkins University with a bachelors in public health studies in 2004. After graduating he worked with an Arab-Jewish cooperative in Haifa, Israel and then taught middle school in East Baltimore. In 2006 he started medical school in at the University of Texas in San Antonio. He completed a master of public health at Harvard School of Public Health before starting residency in general surgery at Boston University Medical Center. He went on to fellowship in trauma and surgical critical care at Cooper University Healthcare in New Jersey. After completing fellowship in 2019 he moved to Stockton California to work at San Joaquin General Hospital, the only trauma center for the one million people in California’s poorest county, where he also serves as the residency program director. He has done medical work abroad in Zimbabwe, Haiti, Dominican Republic, and Palestine, and has been to Ukraine three times with the international medical core for trauma educational work.