Junior doctor from Perth trying to build children's hospital in Gaza

Australia Broadcast Center

3 days ago

As the hospital walls shook and screams filled the night, Dr Mohammed Mustafa turned on his phone to film, simultaneously shocking the world and changing the course of his life.
Bombs were falling again on Gaza, a two-month-long ceasefire abruptly ended by Israel in the early hours of March 18 this year. The trainee emergency doctor from Perth, known as Dr Mo, was thrust into the carnage of a mass casualty event.
"I remember just thinking to myself, 'Oh my God, how many dead are there?'" Dr Mo tells Australian Story.
"And then I went to my room and I just recorded what was going on, what had happened that night."
In the video, the 35-year-old doctor's face is etched with pain and exhaustion as he describes operating through the night on patients, mostly women and children, "burnt head-to-toe, limbs missing".
Overcome, the UK-raised son of Palestinian refugees lowers his head, covers his eyes with his big hand to hide the tears and turns off the video. Then he posts it on social media.
"I think it really struck a lot of chords with a lot of people," Dr Mo says.
"All of a sudden I became this focal point where I had a lot of people wanting to interview me."
Israel has banned foreign journalists from Gaza, and killed more than 170 Palestinian journalists, so Dr Mo became a chronicler of life and death in war-torn Palestine, talking to television networks around the world and taking video of the ever-unfolding nightmare of the emergency room.
Just how deeply Dr Mo's work resonated became clear when he returned to Perth.
Hundreds of supporters, many of whom only knew him via social media, filled the airport arrivals hall and cheers went up as the 190cm, 140kg man-mountain emerged.
His videos also resonated globally, attracting the attention of world leaders and political figures such as former UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and bringing him face-to-face with Piers Morgan and Greta Thunberg.
Five months on, Dr Mo is now on a mission that has taken him not just to the halls of Australia's parliament but to governments around the world: to build a children's hospital in Gaza.
To his 200,000-plus Instagram followers, Dr Mo is known by the username "Beast from the Middle East", a throwback to the chant that would rise up in the crowd as he thundered down the field as a professional rugby player.
For the young Palestinian migrant to the UK, who was targeted at school for his ethnicity and Islamic faith, rugby offered a sense of belonging.
Despite the schoolyard turmoil, he was a bright kid, and from an early age, Dr Mo was well aware his parents wanted him to be a doctor.
"I pushed him hard [to] study medicine," his mother, Iman Mustafa, says. "I love medicine."
After graduating, Dr Mo chose to specialise in emergency medicine, a field that, like rugby and his subsequent title-winning foray into ju-jitsu, satisfied his need for action.
"I wanted to go and help in conflict zones," Dr Mo says.
"I wanted to go help in natural disasters. I wanted to be there when it happened, to be right there and then."
In 2017, despite his mother's protestations, Dr Mo moved to Queensland's Gold Coast to continue his training.
"Emergency medicine in Australia is world-renowned and the pay is a lot better, the lifestyle is a lot better," he says.
He became enamoured with Australia, its people, humour, and culture, and after moving to Western Australia, became an Australian citizen in April 2023.
Six months later, while on night shift, Dr Mo learned of the horrific raids into Israel by Hamas on October 7.
"Those images of women and children being kidnapped and taken into Gaza, when you saw dead women and children, there's no justification for that," Dr Mo says.
But at the same time, he felt a sense of dread, knowing that Israel would respond with deadly force.
"I felt sorry for what the people were about to endure in Gaza," he says.
Israel's retaliatory strikes killed at least 1,900 children by the end of October, according to human rights researchers — an unprecedented toll in modern history.
Dr Mo had never been to Gaza, never met his extended family living there. Now was the time.
He volunteered as an emergency doctor and in June 2024, in the weeks after Australian aid worker Zomi Frankcom was killed by an Israeli air-strike while attempting to deliver food, Dr Mo began his first of two stints in Gaza.
"You could hear the bombs going off in the background and the drones overhead, and you've got these children in body bags [within] the first 30 minutes, hour, that we arrived at the hospital," Dr Mo says.
Dealing with high-stress situations is part of Dr Mo's life. But when he stood up in Parliament House in May to deliver a speech urging support for a children's hospital in Gaza, he was overwhelmed.
"My palms were very, very sweaty and I was very, very nervous," he says.
Dr Mo told of the guilt he harbours from having to decide between the child he can treat and the child who will bleed to death on the floor.
He told of how at least 1,400 healthcare workers have been killed in Gaza since the start of the war. And a child dies there every 40 minutes.
Sitting in the audience, along with politicians, diplomats, and aid workers, was Matiu Bush, the nursing academic with social media know-how who Dr Mo met and collaborated with during his second mission in Gaza.
Together, they spearhead the campaign for the children's hospital, recently spending months overseas engaged in high-level lobbying for support of the proposal.
"We're not an organisation, we're not part of the government," Dr Mo told the crowd. "We're just a doctor and a nurse."
The mission is to build a children's hospital in Gaza, with its kitchen named in Zomi Frankcom's honour.
The plan is to assemble the hospital in Gaza from modular units transported from Jordan. Funding would come from philanthropic donors and the public, with like-minded governments acting as custodians, taking on overall responsibility for the hospital.
Dr Mo has met with Australia's Foreign Minister Penny Wong and the minister for international development, Dr Anne Aly, pushing the need for government negotiations with Israel to allow the hospital.
The UK's under-secretary of state with responsibility for the Middle East, Hamish Falconer, has agreed to consider the proposal. The Irish government has pledged "full support" and the Jewish Council of Australia wants to help fundraise.
He is so busy with his mission, just when Dr Mo will finish his traineeship and become an emergency medicine specialist is uncertain.
But despite the days of darkness Dr Mo experienced while in Gaza, he found a shining light.
"They say don't believe in love at first sight, but I was blown away by this woman," he says.
He worked alongside her in the emergency room, a local doctor, "so kind and compassionate".
He knew her name was Nour, but before he found the courage to ask if she was single, word came through that Dr Mo and other volunteers were to be evacuated from northern Gaza to the south within a few hours.
After arriving in the south, he mentioned his feelings for Nour to an uncle, and everything happened in a rush. Her father was contacted and made the dangerous trip south to meet Dr Mo. The next day, Nour visited. They spoke for a few hours, after which Dr Mo was more convinced than ever that "this is the person that I want to be with".
The next day, her father called. Nour had agreed to marry him.
With drones overhead and bombs falling nearby, their families came together for a small daytime wedding ceremony — and then Nour went back north. Five days later, Dr Mo was flown back to Perth.
"I worry for her safety," Dr Mo says, who has since been denied access to Gaza by Israel. "I can't wait till we manage to get her out of Gaza."
When Dr Mo calls Nour, he can hear fighter jets overhead and knows the danger she faces going to work at the hospital each day.
When he closes his eyes, he sees the lifeless bodies of children he has put into body bags.
"Switching off the phone doesn't stop those images in my head," he says.
"There's a lot of pain that I've got, but if I can put aside the pain and I can focus on something positive, then maybe people from the other side can also put aside their pain and focus on the positive.
"I just want the killing to stop, and I want these kids to grow up with a chance in the future."
Watch Australian Story's Momentum on Monday, August 4, 8pm EST on ABCTV and ABC iview.