Nurse with Sarnia ties returning to Gaza to provide aid

Sarnia’s Nicholas Docktare says a month helping provide aid in Gaza earlier this year changed him.

Article content

“I’m so grateful now for everything,” said the registered nurse who has worked at an Abu Dhabi hospital for nearly seven years, and said in March he visited Rafah for a month as a volunteer with the Red Crescent.

The former surgical nurse at Bluewater Health, Lambton College graduate and instructor, and a graduate from the former Sarnia Collegiate Institute and Technical School (SCITS), said witnessing people — mostly women and children — who were starving, who’d lost limbs, their families, and were somehow still resilient, has made him more appreciative for what he has.

“It was just such an uplifting experience … and terrifying,” said Docktare, 37, who described patients being triaged as bombs fell nearby, shaking the tent where he was working.

Article content

“There were days we would run out of body bags because there were so many casualties and we had to wrap children in sheets,” he said.

He’s going back, he said.

Again, with the Red Crescent — the Islamic equivalent of the Red Cross — potentially in early November, the plan this time is to remove people from the war zone, where little medical infrastructure remains, to Egypt for treatment, he said.

“But they need nurses and doctors to go into Gaza to tend to the patients who are stable enough to be evacuated,” he said.

“That’s our plan next week.”

Docktare said people reacted positively to the Canadian flag on his vest when he went in March, and said many told him they’d never seen a blond-haired, blue-eyed person like him before.

Article content

“Just the idea of ​​them seeing a Canadian there, they were like ‘OK, maybe not all of the west or all of Canada is pro-genocide and pro-Israel,’ he said.

Israel’s war in Gaza — after Hamas killed some 1,200 people and took another 250 hostages, including several Canadian citizens, more than a year ago — has to date killed more than 43,000 peoplemost of them women and children, according to Gaza health ministry officials.

It’s also displaced 1.9 million, as well as destroyed the vast majority of buildings in the densely populated strip bordering Egypt.

The International Court of Justice in January said it was plausible Israel may have breached the genocide convention and called on Israel to ensure its military didn’t commit genocidal acts against Palestinians.

Article content

In July, it called Israel’s occupation of the Gaza Strip and West Bank, including East Jerusalem “unlawful,” and demanded it end, with settlements dismantled and reparations to Palestinians.

A mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians known as the Nakba happened during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.

Docktare, who recently received his master’s in nursing, said in March he witnessed displaced people in tents being bombed by Israelis — “it was reported there was one Hamas member in there” — and noted there were few others who volunteered beside him because of how many nurses and doctors have been killed in the conflict.

The war in Gaza “violates every international crime, every international rule and everything, but there’s still a debate … it drives me crazy,” he said.

Article content

He volunteered because he felt it for humanitarian reasons, he said.

“Right now in Gaza we have the highest amount of child amputees anywhere in the world,” he said. “I saw this first hand. I saw this and I thought, ‘if I have the option to go over and assist, how can I not go over and help?’”

He’s scheduled to speak virtually Nov. 16 at a 6p.m. to 9 pm event hosted by the group Sarnians for Palestine at the Sarnia Library Theatre, he said, to share his experiences.

Hearing about the effects of the war from someone from Sarnia who’s seen it up close, “it’s a whole different story,” he said.

[email protected]

Article content