On this week’s edition of “MintCast,” host Mnar Adley speaks with Dr. Mohammed Tahir about his time working in hospitals in Gaza, Greta Thunberg’s “Freedom Flotilla,” Iraq’s unwavering support for Palestine, and the urgent need for unity in the Islamic world.
Dr. Tahir is a British-Iraqi surgeon specializing in trauma, orthopedics, and peripheral nerve care. Between 2024 and 2025, he spent more than six months working in some of the busiest hospitals in Gaza.
“They were very dark days,” he said of his time there. Tahir talks about being constantly sleep-deprived and waking up every day to immediately start operating on an endless backlog of patients.
There, he told Adley, he and his colleagues would have to deal with a “sea of mangled people. Women, children, burned, dismembered, disemboweled. I saw beheaded people as well.” So constant was the assault that he rarely left the hospital during his many months in the densely populated strip.
During his time there, he was able to see the true nature of the Zionist project firsthand. The experience, he said, bound him closer to his colleagues:
You are united by this evil that you face. The Israelis are trying to extinguish life and you and your colleagues are trying to restore it.”
While Tahir was shocked and appalled by what he witnessed, the silver lining, he said, was that the world is beginning to wake up to the true nature of Israel, a state that he called “the rabid dog of American imperialism.” “The tide is changing,” he said, adding:
We have to believe it. It is only a matter of time. This genocide has unveiled the true and ugly face of Israel that you and I have known all along. But many people have been unaware of, or just not informed on. They are now. Israel cannot undo this.”
Tahir is currently in Iraq, a nation famous for its support for Palestine. Everywhere he goes, he says, he is respected and admired for what he did in Gaza.
“Iraqi citizens are not allowed to go on medical missions. If they were, believe me, they would have flooded the area, because we love Gaza, we stand by Gaza and Palestine, and we will do so until our last drop of blood,” he told Adley.
Don’t miss this informative and poignant episode.
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Mnar Adley is an award-winning journalist and editor and is the founder and director of MintPress News. She is also president and director of the non-profit media organization Behind the Headlines. Adley also co-hosts the MintCast podcast and is a producer and host of the video series Behind The Headlines. Contact Mnar at [email protected] or follow her on Twitter at @mnarmuh.
