AMY GOODMAN: Negotiations for a Gaza ceasefire deal appear to have stalled but are ongoing in Doha. The U.S. is backing a 60-day ceasefire with a phased release of hostages, but significant gaps remain between Israeli and Hamas positions.

The official death toll in Gaza has topped 58,000, though it’s expected to be far higher, with people buried in the rubble as Israeli forces continue to target Palestinians seeking aid. On Sunday, an Israeli missile strike killed at least 10 Palestinians, including six children, at a water distribution point in Nuseirat refugee camp. At least 17 others were wounded in the blast. Israel has also attacked a market in Gaza City on Sunday, killing at least 17 people.

According to the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, nearly 800 people have been killed in Gaza while attempting to access aid just since late May, when the U.S.- and Israeli-backed so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, or GHF, took over most aid distribution sites. On Saturday, at least 27 Palestinians were killed, more than 180 injured, when Israeli forces opened fire on people waiting for humanitarian aid at a distribution site near Rafah. This is Palestinian paramedic Hassan Omran.

HASSAN OMRAN: [translated] Today, more than 150 injuries and more than 20 martyrs around the aid distribution centers. Most of the gunshot injuries we see are in the head or the torso. The Israeli occupation purposely kills and annihilates people. The occupation uses this policy to carry out mass killings by calling on people to get their daily food. Then, when these people get there, they get killed in cold blood.

AMY GOODMAN: The injured from Saturday’s massacre were taken to Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis. Early this morning, Israeli airstrikes wounded and killed several people. This is Itimad Abudaqa, the aunt of a child injured in the strikes.

ITIMAD ABUDAQA: [translated] They live in Asdaa. I don’t know. What matters is that they are martyred, torn to pieces. I don’t know anything about what happened. Thank God. Thank God. What is this child’s fault? Was he carrying a weapon? Was he fighting them? Was he fighting? Is he a fighter?

AMY GOODMAN: This morning’s injured were taken to Nasser Hospital, the largest functioning hospital in Gaza, facing fuel shortages and a widening Israeli offensive in the area.

We go now to Nasser Hospital, to Gaza, to speak with Dr. Tarek Loubani, an emergency room medical doctor who has been volunteering in Nasser Hospital in Gaza since June. He’s the medical director of the Glia Project, an organization creating open-source medical devices for low-resource communities. In 2018, Dr. Loubani was among 19 medics shot by the Israeli military in Gaza. In October 2023, Dr. Loubani was arrested for nonviolently protesting, calling for a ceasefire. He’s also a Palestinian refugee.

Dr. Loubani, welcome back to Democracy Now!, today from Nasser Hospital. Can you describe the injuries, the fatalities that you’re seeing?

DR. TAREK LOUBANI: The injuries are every manner of terrible injuries for a doctor to see. So, one of the things that we’ve grown very accustomed to is, for example, bombings and crush injuries in Gaza. I’ve been working here for 15 years. However, every day brings a new type of severe and terrible injuries. For example, yesterday there were gunshot wounds to the head. Two or three days ago, we were noticing especially young men and boys were getting gunshots to the groin. And so, every day seems to be a new exercise in the depths of human depravity in terms of targeting men, boys, women and children, especially in terms of the youngest children. I think every doctor who operates and works in Palestine will tell you that that’s the most jarring, the most terrible part of our job, is just the war on children on every level.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the injuries you’re seeing as a result of people lining up to get aid from the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, GHF, that shadowy Israeli-U.S. so-called aid organization that so many international aid organizations have condemned? Talk about what you’ve seen there, and the AP investigation saying — releasing video showing the opening fire on the aid seekers.

DR. TAREK LOUBANI: There was no surprise to me when I saw the AP video. It was exactly what patients and Palestinians have been telling me and have been telling us for the past month and a half since GHF really started operating. Almost immediately when they started operating, they started massacring civilians.

The injury patterns, there are two major injury types. One of them is sniper-style shots, people who are shot, it’s very clear, deliberately in the head, especially, or in some other part of the body, like the groin. And then, the other one is where they just unload some semiautomatic or automatic machine, like a machine gun or a light machine gun, into a crowd of people, where, essentially, what they do is they open fire on these heavily, densely packed groups of people and end up not just killing and wounding the people who are seeking aid, but people even up to a kilometer away, especially when they’re using the heavier weapons.

As well, the Israeli army is clearly a part of the massacres. Many of the massacres happen by Israelis, and many of them happen by the mercenaries who pretend to be humanitarian aid workers for the GHF. And the Israeli army will also shoot at collections of Palestinians, will fire on tents close to them. So we see all of these types of injuries, as well. For example, people who are laying in bed, because it’s often late at night or early in the morning, who then get shot because of the rampant and wanton firing of bullets.

What I end up seeing, like I said, is a lot of head injuries, people who come in, essentially, brain dead. Even with the best care, they may not survive. However, with the massive shortages, we have shortages of fuel, which means that we have shortages of oxygen. We also have shortages of equipment, which means that we don’t have basic supplies to treat our patients. Yesterday, when we had one of these massacres, not an aid massacre, but a tent massacre, yet another new form of depravity we didn’t know before this war — and I was on the ground trying to intubate to provide advanced assistance to a patient, while I was on my stomach on the floor, and the patient was on his back on the floor. So, what we see is these reckless types of injuries, in addition to specifically targeted and sniper-type injuries that result in literally dozens of deaths every single day, if not hundreds, and also hundreds of injuries, that then we have a very hard time treating because of the severe lack of equipment.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you, Dr. Tarek Loubani, about Israeli forces targeting Palestinian medical staff. I mean, you have doctors detained, like Dr. Abu Safiya. If you have heard anywhere where he is? And then we’ve gotten reports most recently about threats to medical staff at Nasser, where you are, an email medical staff are receiving, threatening texts. Do you know anything about this?

DR. TAREK LOUBANI: Yes, yes, absolutely. We are — as medical staff, we are a number one public enemy for the Israeli army. We know that. It’s been clear since the beginning, and Palestinian medical workers have said that. Over 1,500 medical workers in Palestine have been killed in the last two years. At least 350 remain in Israeli captivity today. Many, many more people are disappeared. And it is clear that there’s a war on the entire medical system.

At the very best, we receive drips and drabs of medical equipment. Yesterday, I was reviewing the inventory so that we could try to figure out what to prioritize bringing in. The reality is that over 80% of all essential medications are completely stocked out. And that’s figures that, you know, I see day to day. That’s figures that the Ministry of Health, the World Health Organization are all releasing. There’s no secrets here. And, of course, when I came into Gaza, and when other medical teams come into Gaza, if any of them have anything that resembles medical equipment that could be used on others, it is confiscated at the border.

So, yes, we, as a medical system, are targeted. The texts you’re talking about are texts that were received by everybody at the Nasser Medical Complex yesterday who had a cellphone, especially the medical team, telling them that they were de facto targets of the Israeli military and that unless they turn themselves in and turn who even knows in, then they would be considered as hostile enemies.

AMY GOODMAN: So, we’re talking about the massive injuries, the dead. What about the condition of people starving?

DR. TAREK LOUBANI: Every single patient I see is in a state of starvation at this point. And, you know, I know starvation. I’ve seen, you know, people go on hunger strike and things like this. I, myself, have previously been on hunger strike. I’ve seen people who haven’t been able to eat for a week or two or three. That’s not what I’m seeing here. What I’m seeing here is people who have completely depleted all of their protein stores, all of their fat stores, who are literally skin and bones, that I’ve only seen in textbooks and history videos.

And when they come, you know, they tell me, when I ask sometimes out of curiosity, “Well, what took you to the aid sites?” And they tell me about how hungry they are. They tell me about how hungry their families are. Like, one man, just two or three days ago, who was shot in the head, he was brain dead when I saw him. And when I asked his family why he went, they said, “Because his four children were so starved that he finally decided to risk it” — of course, ended up losing his life over it.

The starvation levels affect 100% of people in Gaza. Nobody at all is spared. Every single person is hungry. And the most incredible thing to me was how quickly it set in, even for people like me, who arrived well fed and healthy and then immediately started to experience these severe caloric deficits from the first day. So, not only are we not receiving food, not receiving enough calories, the food we receive is not nutritious. We’re allowed to eat rice. We’re allowed to sometimes eat lentils. You can’t raise babies on that. You know, there is no policy that justifies baby formula being denied entry into a place like Gaza. And yet, I visited the pediatric malnutrition wards. It is a horror show of little children who really should be thriving and who are withering away one moment at a time, while their parents don’t know what to do and sometimes are willing to take the risks to go to these aid sites so they can try to feed them.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the push to move people south, people who have been displaced over and over again? We just had a headline that former Israeli Prime Ministers Ehud Olmert and Yair Lapid have denounced a proposal by Netanyahu’s government to forcibly move Palestinians in Gaza into a so-called humanitarian city to be built on the ruins of Rafah. Both have called it a concentration camp. You have Yair Lapid saying that if they cannot exit, it is a concentration camp. And talk about this procession of humanity south.

DR. TAREK LOUBANI: Yeah, I mean, I’m glad that Israeli politicians have finally come to the same realization that Palestinian healthcare workers and activists have been talking about for, at this point, over two months. This is not a new idea. It is clear that the Israelis have been trying to trap Palestinians in concentration camps. I mean, for all intents and purposes, Gaza was an open-air prison before the war, and Palestinians had been warning about the possibility of that turning into a concentration camp at any moment. So, yes, I’m glad that they have now arrived to this conclusion. I’m glad that the Western world is now taking the Palestinian warnings seriously about a concentration camp.

What the Israelis have been proposing to do now, for at least the last six months, is to try to put all Palestinians into a small area where they have full and complete oversight, where they can dictate life or death, and where they can dictate all of the terms and conditions under which that life or death happen. And, of course, as we see from the GHF’s operating philosophy, they would be able to kill anybody who they wanted at any point. I mean, right now the GHF receives people who they run through all of these security checks and, despite that, is murdering them, gunning them down with wanton, reckless abandon.

So, I think that this, the idea of a concentration camp, is predicated on forcing people out — you know, there’s nothing voluntary about it, as some Israeli politicians talk about — on forcing people out by removing all of the ingredients of life. We’ve seen them remove clean water. There’s no clean water in Gaza for any intents and purposes. There is no food really anywhere. And it’s getting worse by the day. There’s no fuel. The fuel shortages that I mentioned earlier are yet worse than they’ve ever been.

And all of this has been resulting in hundreds of additional deaths each day. I see patients who are shot every single day. I see patients who are blown up every single day. But what’s new over the past month is that now I also see patients who are starving to death or who have starved to death. I see little babies, which are often reported, sometimes not. And I also see elderly people, people with immune conditions, people with chronic conditions. This is what the Israelis count on to force people into the concentration camp. However, they are so incapable of even pretending for one moment that they would treat anybody humanely that I think, based on what we see from the GHF, Palestinians are nowhere near falling for this trap.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, like every other doctor who’s worked in Gaza, you work — you’ve treated children. There’s a new acronym that has been coined since Israel’s siege of the territory, ”WCNSF,” “wounded child, no surviving family.” Can you end by telling us some of their stories?

DR. TAREK LOUBANI: Yeah, I will. You know, I always thought that Palestine was something that I needed to understand to understand what else was going on in the world. What I’ve come to understand and see by stories like “wounded child, no surviving family” is that Palestine is the central issue, not just of our time, but of the past hundred years. Everything we see happening in Palestine, like the treatment these children are receiving, is what’s going to happen in every other domain. And that’s, you know, an idea, not one that I’ve come up with, but that talented analysts and historians have been talking about for a while, such as Dr. Gucciardo or Dr. Podur, who both analyze these and talk about them.

In terms of wounded children, basically, what we see a lot of the time, what I’ve stopped doing for the past several months now, I’ve stopped asking any child I see about whether they’re there with somebody or whether there’s anybody there for them. You know, it’s get so busy, we get literally dozens of patients at a time because of these massacres. And so, sometimes we need somebody to go grab blood for this little 2-year-old or 1-year-old who’s on the floor. And when I ask, you know, “Where’s this boy’s family?” “Where’s this girl’s family?” often I get the same acronym back: “Dr. Tarek, this is a wounded child, no surviving family.”

And so, we try to treat them. They’re often too young to understand that their parents are dead. But they sit there struggling, wounded. You know, we’ve seen so many. We’ve seen a flood of videos. Like, for example, just two days ago, a child who I saw who had more than half of her body surface area burned, and where I was looking for somebody to comfort her, and there was simply nobody, and so I picked her up and just held her for a few minutes until there was somebody else who could come to hold her so I could go back to treating my other patients. All I could think is that this story, there are tens of thousands at this point of people, of children in Gaza who have lost one or both of their family. Understanding what’s happening to them is understanding war as it’s being proposed for the rest of the world.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Tarek Loubani, I want to thank you for being with us, Palestinian Canadian doctor, emergency room medical physician volunteering at Nasser Hospital in Gaza since June, medical director of the Glia Project, an organization creating open-source medical devices for low-resource settings.

Coming up, “How Netanyahu Prolonged the War in Gaza to Stay in Power.” That’s the headline of a new New York Times investigation. We’ll speak with the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ronen Bergman. Back in 20 seconds.

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AMY GOODMAN: “Fenfo,” “Something to Say,” by Fatoumata Diawara, performing in our Democracy Now! studio.