so i'm jerry haynes this is bob haynes and we are members of washington physicians for social responsibility and in one thousand nine hundred two i started organizing trips for w p s art to go into the middle east and one of the places that we went in january of one thousand nine hundred three was and we met this wonderful man child psychiatrist is this the right loud ok named and we also met with our is really colleagues at that time and that trip was an incredible eye opener for me about what the united states was paying for and how many israelis wanted us to stop doing what we were doing and promoting what they saw as an injustice well we have been back i've been back every year i was just telling someone two or three times a year since then i think well maybe i won't go back for a while and then i think i can't stop myself from going back so after two thousand and nine at the end of the attack called cast lead i'm gaza we decided that instead of just going back and learning and watching and talking to people that it was time for washington positions for social responsibility to start doing service work not really in our charter because we're an ngo dedicated to education so use me but it was just not ethical anymore for us to go in and look parachute in pick up our parachute and walk home it didn't make sense so i began to organize these delegations that had medical people in them and my husband bob as some of you know as a cardiologist and he has willingly and kindly and enthusiastically most of the time also made these trips and we've come back and reported and talked to you about some of these trips but tonight we want to talk to you about asking you to imagine that you live as a person in gaza that you are on the receiving end and indirect taxes paid by the united states of america that i as a taxpayer have deep in inviting feelings of sorrow about what i pay for and the people that i torture and make afraid and live in terror so it's a very personal thing for me that we do this and also my israeli friends say to me tell the people in the states to stop this because we think this is an injustice that can only be righted when you take away this kind of support we want this to end and if you want to look up some really fine israeli sites on your computer that will reinforce what i'm telling you look up the shah g i s h a and physicians for human rights israel because these people are doing monumental work to try to overcome some of the injustices that are being perpetrated in this area and our next trip is scheduled for next month will go when we leave here on the eleventh of april and go in on the fourteenth and we'll be there for just a week what we have discovered in guys that is a cohort of children who are born genitalia one of five places on the earth where this is a commonality and so in with us each time goes of young and wonderful pediatric neurologist name rich grady and rich operates and teaches from morning till evening on these children who have surgical needs that can't yet be met and this time he hopes to concentrate on teaching all right iraq and then you get into jordan was a pretty big get down to this israel which is the pink and you see the west bank which is a sort of a tan color in the middle of that pink and then a tiny dot on that entire thing is gaza strip here and it is just to a very similar thing this is a larger pullback this is the jordan river valley israel and the west bank is in here and gaza strip is down here on the mediterranean and this is the gaza strip i'm just going to point out just geographically that this is a low level this is actually comes all the way up from the rift valley but this is geographic formation this is the jordan river and this is all high ground and then water flows down to the mediterranean from the high ground has got the cursor going and the water that flows down should flow right on out to the mediterranean sea through gaza but israel has put in a ton of wells all through here so the water is no longer able to flow plenty of water coming down but no longer able to flow into gaza and refill the aquifer it's all put out in wells into israel and this is the whole gaza strip that used to have several ways to get in rafa coming in from egypt is so open to people and then these other places were all places that would have people coming in and out from israel but no longer if they're all closed there is one place that comes in here term shome for trucks and and material but it's very very very very very in some other areas as well so i think that's about it so again we're going to ask you tonight to think that you're a refugee you had a home in israel in one nine hundred forty eight and now you are in the gaza strip in your family has been there since one nine hundred forty eight still wishing that you could return to israel but knowing that that's probably not ever going to happen but i now israel has placed under an incredibly tight see so so you living in gaza maybe can't get the medicine that you need maybe can't get the food that you need can't sell your produce anymore can't fish in the ocean anymore you are now in we call an open air prison where i have a friend who wrote to me this way can said don't call this an open air prison in prison people are well cared for and i said but there are so many things that are similar because i living cannot come in and out i living in gaza i don't have access to the medicine that i need when we go in again taking the drug if she runs out she just goes without and then she begins to feel worse and worse and worse until we come in again and bring in the drug now laura hart who is an adult your alleges and i went into gaza not specifically on a medical mission but to see our friend dr surprised and serve to lay the groundwork for this april trip right after the operation a pillar of cloud which happened in november of this last year operation pillar of cloud was aggressive fast killed a lot of people in a hurry in suppose a retaliation for rocket strikes and then things were loosened up after that because there was such a strong outcry from the international community then that right after we got back there that shooting on the east coast and all those little children were shot and killed and i went quickly to my computer sort of in the middle of the night thinking about this and went back upstairs  four children in gaza there were forty eight children killed in that eight day period and five hundred ten real wounded and i paid for that i don't know how we come to terms with that kind of awareness that you and i if we pay taxes are culpable for what's going on with these people bob likes to say this is not a natural disaster this is a caused problem and it has some ways out of this if we adhere to our humanity so there are one point seven million people living in gaza in three hundred sixty square kilometers yellow metropolitan areas fifteen thousand two hundred nine square kilometers israel is sixteen thousand square kilometers two thirds of the people living in gaza or be a few days from forty eight and sixty seven over half are under eighteen years of age and the majority are muslim women so i show you this picture of seattle because i think it's significant i just told you that seattle is the c l metropolitan area is over fifteen thousand square meters gaza is three hundred sixty square meters about two point three percent of the size of seattle the population of seattle is about four million the population of g one point seven million making it one of the most densely populated places on the earth imagine if you will that down in one little tiny corner of this map would be two point three percent of that land mass with almost half as many people as populate this whole big territory it's incredibly incredibly crowded there the air is dirty the land is thirty the water is dirty i living in gaza having no access to a healthy life even if i am very wealthy the water good the water is bad the lights go off it's a very difficult place to live though bob showed you from the north part of guys that air it's checkpoint when we first started because that there it's checkpoint w turnstile i have a seven hundred ninety three now there is checkpoint it's a long cage to get through it and so you walk a long long way and two years ago when we went in we were greeted with and i took in forty five hundred dollars with the medicine in december it was confiscated by hamas and it took us c december january march they finally released that medicine and ok why are they are they doing that while hamas is trying to have a bureaucratic government that's similar to ours we wouldn't let anyone just bring medicines into our country and start distributing them willy nilly even if they were you know reputable which we think we are but they're telling us don't bring medicines in here without permission so this time when we go we'll take electronic equipment like a computer and a hard drive for gaza community no health program and we'll take lots of school supplies and we'll take soccer balls and we'll take pumps for soccer balls which are always that hot demand because the palestinians love to play soccer and so you know they can't get that stuff very easily so we'll take it in for them with as much money as we can gather and spend and stuff that we can pack in our suitcases this is rough a checkpoint bob told you between the southern part of gaza and egypt and while the profit checkpoint is a little easier to go in and out of it takes an application weeks and weeks ahead of time and sometimes the application is rescinded and then the territory south of or off a into egypt has become intermittently more and more dangerous for people who try to get from down to cairo so this is not an easy trip either and then there's this option there's a woman that i met him bet they have name a mira and when i first met her she said well i went into gaza the first time through the tunnel which was that i want to go in through the tunnel and then we went to the tunnels and they were full of gasoline and horrible smells and then we heard the terrible stories that more than two hundred people have died in the crush of the tunnels and and i became a little bit of a chicken am afraid but it still somehow appeals to my not a child i think to go through that  all the tunnels now are regulated by hamas and they're taxed by hamas and so it's not at what it was fifteen years ago when the tunnels were much more rudimentary and people were coming in bring but brides come through the tunnels camels come through the tunnels cars come through the tunnels lots of things go through the tunnels but still not very safe ok this is a monorail going on one of tell you just a little bit about a money because i want you to to know some of these people we've known a mani since two thousand and nine when she helped us through the gaza committed mail health program to put our program together she's an extremely hard working young woman with a college degree very bright very lovely emails me all the time talks to me about what she's doing she's not working for gaza community mental health anymore but i love this girl and i would pretty much do anything i could to help her and yet it's so limited what i can do next to her is we we as her brother william works for iraq he has a responsible job he's in his twenty's v really sweet boy who has a seizure disorder and when we can get his seizure medicine he looks just fine he functions and nothing's wrong but when his seizure disorder medicine runs out seizes and then he stays home until he can get his medicine again and it's very intermittent and it's not reliable and we am suffers and his whole family suffers and there they very educated very loving wonderful family suffering from something that they certainly had nothing to do with they're in prison there's nothing they can do so the fellow on the right is my patient a mohammed and his son brought him into a clinic i see maybe twenty some people a day and when i'm done with some of them i ask take your photograph and  and so they consented and the picture illustrates several things in this particular picture stature this is the only place that i've gone around the world that i felt tall in g a i'm about five eight five nine and it just occurred to me some day that everybody else is sort of shorter than i was everyone but lots of folks and mohammed had come early in the visit to kind of get a second opinion is this what i should do he just had a heart catheterization and they found that he didn't just have one bad corner already but several including his left main corner or a tree and that is not a good set up for many problems so he needed bypass surgery needed it's significantly and so we informed him you know this is what you have to do and there are three cities out in the west bank who would do this for him  the doctor i was working with contacted the doctors out there jerusalem ramallah and hebron all to bypass surgery and it was all working out he got his family together his family is not like five children and two adults it's like fifty people you know in and so they all pooled their money and they were going to help this grand old man hunt to go out and get his bypass surgery they came back later in the week and everything was set to go except that israel would not let him out and why is that because he had done nothing wrong but a nephew of his had been captured once throwing rocks at the israelis and it was to punish the entire family they would not let him out and that's kind of on a micro scale one family one man and this man will die because and probably has i haven't heard when i've been back but that there is a seventy  percent three year mortality for this kind of disease left banke ornery artery disease and so he will die and it won't be a statistic that was in violence and a war or anything it'd just be an old man dying but it was something that was preventable and fixable  but he's not going to make it clearly because of this collective punishment so i have two themes about gaza one of them is that it's not a natural disaster we see these terrible terrible disasters around the world the mudslides the earthquakes just awful things and hundreds of thousands of people die and we just feel awful you know japan i mean just name it they're terrible natural disasters and i feel awful for them and this is not a natural disaster this is a manmade disaster made by and repeated to by that's point number one for me and point number two is collective punishment it's not fair it's not right it's against  international laws and agreements and yet you know these guys they didn't do anything wrong and the vast majority of the people we speak with didn't do anything wrong i mean they're just like they really literally just like israel and all the restrictions but also now by hamas and lots of restrictions there too so it's a it's a pretty difficult place to live in and yet we see this the sense of humor  resilience the wonderful spirit that we get and that's partly what draws me back is the the the beauty of of the people under duress and how they are wonderful with us and wonderful with one another this little girl was of a family of about six children i think her name is a mira she and her sister and brothers all have pale skin this ready red hair short stature look two years younger than their stated ages they are of the cohort of children and that probably is between ten and twelve percent now in gaza suffering from chronic malnutrition that's a huge high percentage now in iraq we were able to see that number climb to twenty two percent we don't want that to happen in gaza and yet we see the number  creeping up because people don't have access to adequate nutrition it is probably taking care of about seventy percent of the people in gaza but as you know the united nations is really falling short on cash and so they're having to cut back on some of their programs hopefully not yet on food for people in gaza and yet so many of these kids look like this kids that had should have hair as dark as mine with this ready red hair with short stature and ability to learn fully and to ward off disease it's a tragedy to see these beautiful little children and she is beautiful has and she but she's chronically malnourished some of you have heard me tell this story before because the last april one of the things that i do is go in and talk with mothers whose children have died here in seattle for the last twenty three years i've been facilitating a group for mothers whose children have died and so when i go into gaza i want to meet some of these mothers and i met last april with a woman who had put her four children to bed three of them ages four three and two in a room adjacent to hers and took the baby to bed with her to her to sleep with herself that to be nursed she fell asleep just after the children had asked her to light a candle in their room because there was no interest that he intermittent electricity is chronic in gaza that electricity gets shut off for a number of reasons that the taxes that are collected don't get distributed to of ramallah or israel shuts down their part of the power plant whatever reason it's probably eight hours on eight hours off would be the norm and these children were in a period of time when the electricity was off for twelve hours or more and they said please light a candle for us in our room so the woman took her baby to bed to nurse the baby and fell asleep and woke up with  with smoke billowing through the door of her children's room and all three of them died because the candle had burned down and tipped over and let the room fire that woman's family is related to a young man who now is going to school that they washed in the state university so here we have coming home to us this tragedy of people who are right here in our midst study in our university heartbroken because their cousins died in such a senseless and needless tragedy go ahead this is like that teeny tiny tip of the birth of the history of this place and if you want to know the history of this place it's complex it starts out you know way what did rich say to me just before we came in there were people debating where the air was ever came from in the first place then he said to me god knows and but here we are starting with the ottoman empire and through the balfour declaration one by one thing happening that meant that the arab people didn't have a state and the jewish people did have a state now if you read your history all know that the arabs were offered a state and declined because they felt with not without reason that land that they had was being taken away and then in one nine hundred forty eight of course there was a war and a lot of their land was taken away and their villages were destroyed and people were displaced both inside israel outside israel into jordan into syria into lebanon and into the gaza strip so the tragedy just unfolds further and further and further and gets worse and worse because the west bank is no longer a coherent piece of land they idea that we could have a two state solution becomes more and more remote because there really aren't pieces of land that you could connect and call two states it's a very difficult political problem right now and you know i'm living in gaza and i'm tired of this i've been i'm up i'm an eighteen year old kid i've never had freedom i've never been able to walk out freely my dad was shot my little brother was shot i am angry in some way though i am nonviolent by nature i understand those rockets i understand that out of complete desperation i don't because my education has been hampered and because i'm chronically malnourished i understand that desperate acts happen and so the rockets are fired and the retaliation happens and the retaliation is brutal and overwhelming in two thousand and eight two thousand and nine fourteen hundred people were killed in gaza ten israelis were killed some of them by friendly fire the level of post traumatic stress disorder what we no longer call p t s d but continuous traumatic stress injury is universal in gaza everyone has been and is continuously traumatized go ahead so  few slides from december of two thousand and twelve after a pillar of cloud this little boy was injured when a rocket hit his home and his father was badly injured and so that's his uncle holding  him they had come to the hospital to visit the daddy who has maintained in the hospital lots hundreds and hundreds of children were injured go ahead this was eight days eighteen schools where they're partially or fully destroyed this is the united nations school this building just sort of in an a horrible way fascinated me if you can see up at the top there is a place where a missile went made a direct hit can you see that it just there was a hamas official in that apartment and the missile hottest right through imagine what that would have been like to be on the floor below had that concussion concussive effect of such a strike took out that entire apartment all the way through go ahead some of you may have read about this home there were eleven people killed in one airstrike in this home amy because they were aiming for a targeted hamas official now the rumor in gaza went like this a qatari official came into guys though in the months before operation pillar of be identified now i don't usually tell urban myth but i heard it so often and guys that i begin to think oh my gosh i wonder if that's really true whether it's true or not the ability to target hamas officials is a very discrete generally speaking and in this place they had a hamas official who just before the strike came walked out the door and babies were killed and mothers were killed and eleven people were killed and you can see in the background here there are some pretty substantial to welling's then there's some real money and gaza people who are supplied money from the gulf states it's a small portion of the people but hamas officials were targeted again and the reason i show you this light is you see this kid picking up wire the debris we know from reports that the israelis have done what we've done which is to use hearing him to thirty eight in their weapons uranium to thirty eight is a low radioactive highly toxic material and when i look at his picture of this kid with a wired in its hand i think what's his future we know that in iraq the number of people now with cancers and congenital malformations is just skyrocketed if you look at d'argent mails recent reports from iraq you'll see that are investigations underway in the places where the united states used to bring him to thirty eight at the highest level well we're going to see that in guys who we can almost guarantee here i just want to talk about the no go area and a running from left to right is a silver strip which is the large wall that's about ten meters or so that separates gaza on our side and israel on the other side of that picture and the wall is heavily fortified no one would ever dare to go in and out over or under that wall but all the point of the picture i want to point out is his no  go area which is from the wall into gaza about two or three kilometers that is arable land you see it's green it's growing grass or whatever through where that little arrow is going and that's the wall there i was pointing out and my point is that there is a lot of arable land i mean acres scores of acres of arable land that the people are not able to use because they're not allowed to get anywhere near that wall and they're also so the best septic drainfield sewage treatment plants are in that same area and israel has turned them down they're not allowed to utilize that either for crops or for this septic sewage treatment plant they want to build that sewage treatment plant up there near the wall in the southern part of guys there but they were denied the permit and also the materials and so they built a sewage treatment plant near the mediterranean and when the power goes out all the sewage just drifts right to the sea and then seeps out into the mediterranean it's just it's awful go ahead at the end of pillar of cloud in november one of things one of the results of the outcry from the international community was that the no go zone was narrowed so that people were really happy that they're going to get to go out there and tend their crops that this young man is one of those people who went out into the no go zone thinking that he was going to celebrate with his friends that they could actually go out there and not be shot and he was shot and he was shot in a oh terrible wound to his growing his surgeon described they had to reconstruct for vessels and they weren't sure even then that they were going to be able to save his leg but when his little boy curled up on the bed with me with pretty happy so again just to review seventy percent of the population is food  percent rely on international aid for crop failures due to chlorides in the soil crop danger did in one in the soil and that's from free or flowing sewage that's either fully or partially treated  and there's this horrible loss of access to fish protein at the end of pillar of cloud in december it was declared that what had been originally some years ago a twelve mile radius that people could go out and fish and then narrowed to a six mile radius and then finally has been below us few years a three mile nautical mile radius where they could fish but the water was polluted in the fish were young and small that was increased to six nautical miles again so there was a great rejoicing in gaza in december january when that change was made so they are going to be able to fish in a little deeper water and then while our president was recently in israel two rockets were fired out of gaza that the limit run right back to three nautical miles so it's very hard for these people to follow their fishing inclination and feed their children with safe protein there they are beached boats and this is the free flowing sewage that out into the mediterranean and there are days when you can stand on the edge of the mediterranean with children playing and one hundred the beach and see a brown pool semi circle right out in the water and it's just coop this particular stream is called the gaza river of gaza and it's dammed up on the israeli side so that very very little water flows through unless there's a storm and in high water times israelis open up the barriers and why gaza flows very freely and floods this whole plane and covers a paper on resilience he's getting his ph d in psychology marwan told me at our last visit and that in his forty two years he has never taken a drink from a fountain or a tap hasn't been safe for him to do that but the middle east children's alliance has been working very hard in the schools in gaza and there are either fourteen or eighteen schools now that have water they're safe to drink and so we went to this school and saw these children drinking out of a tap and i thought oh my gosh they're tough but no the director of a school walked up to the tap and said i'll show you mecca has made it safe for us to drink th water so that was the really hopeful thing that we saw but at the same time it's such a tragedy that these little children have never had a dream kind of a tap until this particular wonderful group of people led in gaza by a dermatologist named dr mona have been able to make this adjustment in the water system so all these things i list for you water sewage food soil that tricity the air the buildings are unsafe medical care is haphazard education is their risk and bubble touches some of the schools i've written a complex link down at the bottom of  this that is a report from the united nations relief works association which says what will gaza look like in twenty twenty they estimate that another half million people will live there that there will be no clean drinking water now that's ninety ninety five to ninety five percent polluted the situation in gaza if we don't do something is destined for complete disaster and we're very close now  he's doing both simultaneously helping these people do a better job operating and the the facilities are quite barely adequate and lots of pieces of equipment are missing i just mention that the gentleman that i spoke about earlier had just had a heart catheterization which is pretty simple straightforward thing a big fluoroscopy machine and and certain materials are available but the lot of politics the catheterizations could have happened in three different hospitals they've all been moved down to one hospital which is sort of a mouse sanctioned and our government does that to a certain extent t try to limit the number of procedures done so that every hospital doesn't duplicate everything but this is a little bit more political in the a bit more stringent and in in this particular hospital where this gentleman had his heart  the catheterization lab broke down i went to go visit and i wanted to do some catheterizations with the patients and know they couldn't do it because there was one piece missing about a eight inch long piece and they had had it on back order for some time it had come in from  scandinavia to to fix the piece and yet the israelis kept it at ben gurion airport and wouldn't let it come in because it might be something connected with a bomb or a rocket or something that sort and so they said no no a lot of pleads back and forth back and forth back and forth so the clever people at the catholic just take pictures they took pictures of the broken piece and showed where it fit into the machine and in fact all that know take diabetes or anything take insulin for diabetes or anything that is needs refrigeration but imagine what you are happens when your electricity is off for a twelve twenty four hours at a time  guess it's important to know that these people are well educated they know what to do they know what they want to do they just lack the equipment and all the guys there with one point seven million people there's one functioning m r i one functioning m r i machine i said to bob how many m r i machines are there at evergreen hospital and he said well me think two or three in the hospital one or two on the outside of the hospital we think we could we came up with five for that little community hospital in kirkland that's crazy you know sure we need to use our medical care in a more efficient way that goes without saying but one point seven million people and one machine and war and bullet wounds and fractures they are really limited in what they can do in safe medical practice ahead so i'm just this is our last slide there is in gaza this strong belief in the will of law brings to them everything that happens and in some ways they feel as though that's helping them to survive because they have an amazing amount of resilience i'm not sure that i could have them out of resilience that i see there every time i go the amount of hope hopefulness and the amount of anger the amount of hopelessness and the amount of hope they just keep trying or over and over again to rebuild their communities to make their children feel safe in a place where there is no safety they're working hard on women empowerment clinics to better educate the women and give them work to do and they are working hard to educate their children to the point that they will triple shift to their kids in the few schools that they have and what they need is our help not to do for them but to help them gain freedom to help them gain respect in the world by telling their story by not forgetting that they're there it's so easy pillar of cloud happens everybody hears about guys on c n n anderson cooper goes in to c n n and flexes its muscles and looks cute in his t shirt and comes out and it's over and it goes quiet again and we don't think about it because we're on to news as entertainment one more time but these people every single day of their lives live with us so i am so grateful to you for caring i'm so thankful to you for being here and we would love to take questions from you collin is going to pass the basket around in case you want to contribute to some of that equipment that we're going to take in this next time all of the physicians and nurses who go into guys that pay their own way entirely and they go they take their vacation i don't take i'm on vacation permanently but but they take vacation to go in and do this work and i'm really grateful to them for the dedication that they show this time we have nine people going in through air that's and for people coming in through rafa one of those people went in on a boat and she can call him he can sure of but you know that's ok we're going to band together once we get into gaza and do our little bit of week of work and remind people that they're not forgotten thank you i'm sorry when you can wri if you want to check you can write to washington physicians for social responsibility p s r and then it's tax deductible question yes birth rate there aren't many people seeking to go into gaza to live no i'm not being i'm not being sent of course facetious about that there are people who leave gaza have families and go back in because it's home for them because the their tribe is there and i say tribe in the sort of the most loving way that that's what feels good to them and safe and it's home you know and and if we lose that here we've lost that here in her community sometimes suffer from a lack of that and they feel safe with one another rich for things we could do i always tell you to write to your congressman i still believe it's important for you to do that you know and jim mcdermott says to me i get one letter from one person i go well there's a letter from you know he doesn't say in a case but you know you might say that if i get letters from five people i begin to scratch my head and think if i get letters from ten people i think well this is an issue if i get letters from one hundred people i know i have to pay attention so you know it's still matters that you write letters find the people in israel who are working for peace and support them right to right to physicians for human rights israel right to or the i care i had the israeli committee against town it housing demolition it support those people they've had a hard time in the last five years because they've been working through it a more or less liberal government but you know we all have that same issues that we want we want things to be better and we know some of the things that we're up against about getting enough food for people and enough medical care for people and all of that so we should not be strangers to some of those those challenges that's two things you think i mean a thing they can do if anybody here have a suggestion ok i keep thinking rich that i think karl well it's at least one theory about what it's about there isn't a large natural gas reservoir that has been reported off the coast of gaza and i usually talk about that there was a supposedly  an agreement between yasser arafat and the israeli government about what was going to happen with that natural gas reserve or the people of gaza hamas for sure have been left out of all negotiations about that natural gas reservoir but  the reports are that it's pretty rich and could supply a huge amount of resource for that entire region but if you have to look hard for the information and it varies every time i look at it hit changes so sometimes the reports say the natural gas reservoir is very big and sometimes it's not so significant and sometimes the egyptians are playing with it with israel in it it's  bouncing balloon but supposedly it's very significant well there are goods coming in through the tunnels hamas is taxing them as i mentioned to you the muslim brotherhood i think has had various positions on that and so i can't even guess where they are on it right now but good to do come in through the tunnels in operation a pillar of cloud many of the tunnels were destroyed again and so they're now rebuilding in trying to reopen some of those tunnels the goods that come in are expensive the gas that comes in is leaded they burn that let it gas in their generators and put the and out but i can't tell you where there right now nor can i but as we all know it's a very complex situation and because with this arab spring there was great hope and lots of openings occurred and lots of help and movement back and forth there's a lot of commonality of of people and families in egypt to southern gaza but then the muslim brotherhood came in and it was then the united states and israel you know what about this treaty do you want you i think we all know that the egypt is the second greatest recipient of foreign aid from united states and if you want to continue to have that then you're going to have to do some things and whole black market and then there's this gray market and there's some people who are filthy rich filthy rich with this money and economy it's underground economy  much in cahoots with the hamas so there's a there's a lot of forces going on that are very complex and i don't know much more than that but there's an awful lot of secrecy and we we just not are privy to th e whole area the whole event has suffered some from drought in recent years until about two years ago and suddenly they had a lot of her hanging and the grasses were all green and people felt a little bit more hopeful about water gaza has a natural aqua for that because of the population has been over pumped and has been polluted with chlorate as bob showed you along the border the israelis have drilled wells that would naturally fill the hochul for in guys a but have been prevented from doing that so they have two sources of lack one is th refilling from the israeli side and one is overpumping from the population side well the third one then is drought so the water is an issue and as i mentioned the nitrates in the soil have polluted the earth and the water and the chlorides from using water that has sail and that is the problem and then israel is putting in apparently two desalinization plants that will clean up the water so that it will be sailing free or safe to drink but that will be for israel and there are environmentalists who are fighting that because the desalin plants are not without negative effects on the environment they kill a lot of fish they get ground up and then put back into the ocean so they pollute the ocean there is no easy answer for a population that's too high to be sustained by a water source that's insufficient yes well again there are groups that work on that very thing and i could if you want to write to me i can give you some links to that there are a lot of people who are aware and working and working with israelis and working with people in gaza working with people in the west bank to try to raise awareness but as i said you know you can raise awareness and it drifts away pretty quickly the tragedy brings the headlines and when the acute tragedy is gone the headline goes away and we are a nation of short attention span i'm afraid yes cohen it would depend on what kind of equipment they needed to take in with them because there are definite prohibitions about what can go in bob mentioned to you the school situation th approved i think the construction of three hundred new schools is that right and and then were given the building materials for eight they need hundreds of new schools and it's instituted higher security policy of how you get into gaza and so you have to be a member of an international ngo to be able to gain access and i'll tell you this on a personal getting in this time has been a real chore probably one hundred e mails and fifty phone calls and have to mcdermott's office hadn't helped as we wouldn't be getting in but the people who made it possible for us to get in this time are the people in the israeli consulate in san francisco so we have to form alliances with people who care and we cannot demonize people you know we have to be a member that we are all of the family and the more we love each other the better so i'm going to take one more question ok so we're leaving here on the eleventh of april we're going to going to be gone eleven days this time because dr greedy can only be gone for that short period of time and if you want to contribute we'll take in school supplies we'll take in  tylenol and advil things that we don't need prescriptions for where our collecting money to take in equipment to the gaza community mental health program they want to hard drive they want a computer they want to you know things like that that they can easily gain and we can take in for them so donations to washing physicians for social responsibility or tax deductible and we can take that ok tide so he have contacts contact them because certainly and if you haven't read make up tell it's book run out and buy it oh my gosh it's so inspiring this guy who was born to a general of nine hundred forty eight who became one of the greatest peace workers israel will ever know is absolutely a stumper for peace so i agree with you more high profile people speaking with integrity very important thing that we could do we need to bring  here we need and richard falk and if you can think of someone and that's something i'd be happy to work on cell all right we have to stop for tonight but thank you rich thank you for letting us come here to