As the bombs continue to fall on Gaza and humanitarian corridors remain blocked, the meaning of neutrality is being tested like never before. What does it mean to bear witness in a war where even speaking out can carry consequences? In this episode of The Voices of War, I explore these questions with someone who navigates them every day. My guest is Ashley Killeen, Director of Engagement at Médecins Sans Frontières Australia and New Zealand, an organization operating at the frontline of one of the most politically fraught humanitarian crises in the world today. Ashley leads the teams responsible for connecting people in Australia and New Zealand with MSF’s medical humanitarian work around the world. She works to bridge the gap between MSF’s frontline missions and those watching from afar, amplifying the voices of patients, staff, and communities that too often go unheard. This mission has become particularly urgent in Gaza, where international media is banned and the act of bearing witness has never been more vital. Today, we delve into the limits of neutrality, the strategic decisions behind when to speak out and when to stay silent, and how to tell human stories in a world flooded with information and disinformation alike. This conversation is about the ethical tightrope that humanitarian organizations walk in Gaza and beyond, where courage often looks like restraint, and where silence can sometimes speak loudest of all. Ashley, welcome to The Voices of War.

Thank you for having me.

So just before we dive into Gaza specific, for those unfamiliar, can you give us a quick overview of MSF’s mission and perhaps a brief profile of your staff and what distinguishes MSF’s presence in places like Gaza from other humanitarian actors?

Yeah, absolutely. So MSF was founded in 1971 as an offshoot of the Red Cross and it was founded by a group of journalists and doctors really in response to the Red Cross’s activities around the Biafran War where millions of civilians died and this group of people were really disheartened with the lack of messaging around the catastrophe of what was happening from the Red Cross’s perspective.

So there was a real desire to combine the treatment of people from a medical perspective with the prevention and the speaking out of the circumstances in which those wounds were being created. And that’s where Médecins Sans Frontières came from. It’s a mission that’s been carried through over 50 years. But at the heart of that is témoignage, which is the French word for speaking out or bearing witness, which is very much what we do in situations when we need to platform what is happening to the communities that we’re working within, to the patients that we’re trying to treat, because often medical care alone is not going to solve the situation.

To make a sweeping statement about it, it’s like putting a Band-Aid on a bullet hole. You need to look at what else we have in our toolkit to be able to better the lives of the people that we’re trying to treat. So when you look at a situation like Gaza, where you have people trying to deliver medical services within a genocide, there comes a point where it’s not sustainable.

And we need to be able to use our medical evidence-based data and our medical perspective and our ability to do surveys, epidemiological surveys, and understand exactly what’s happening on the ground and amplify that again so that we can try and improve the conditions and the context in which we’re trying to provide lifesaving care.

So that’s where we’re at with Gaza. It’s a community that MSF has worked in for over 20 years. It’s a community that we have strong ties to. It’s a community we have a lot of respect within. And a lot of people don’t realize that actually 80% of our staff that we have all around the world, including in Gaza, are local staff. In Gaza, we have close to a thousand local staff working there. We only have around a hundred internationally mobile staff. So doctors, nurses, logisticians coming in from Australia, New Zealand and other countries. The majority of staff there are local and it’s our responsibility to stand in solidarity with them and to be able to bear witness to what’s happening there as well.

Yeah, I mean, I think the bearing witness piece is perhaps what distinguishes MSF from a lot of the other organizations because you take that as an actual principle that you will speak out even if it is not necessarily palatable to some of the parties involved. And I note that you also used quite openly the term genocide, which perhaps is a very, very hot and debated topic, which also then means that an organization like MSF, what you say can be politicized, can be used against you in many ways. How do you find the balance? I mean, even just using the term genocide, which, you know, perhaps not to my audience, but to other audiences, might be quite confronting. So how do you weigh up making ultimately a political statement or even a legal statement about it being a genocide versus speaking out about what you see on the ground?

Témoignage, speaking out, it’s one tool that we’ve got in the kit. And you need to balance that with the other things that we can do to help improve the lives or to help treat the patients and the communities in which we operate. And yes, it’s a legal statement. It’s a legal term, genocide.

But from what we’ve been able to gather from an evidence-based perspective and rooting that in medical data, we have the confidence to be able to say to the international community and say from our platform, which is a trusted organization of over 54 years, this is what we’re seeing and this is what we believe it is.

And we do conduct a lot of surveys, epidemiological surveys, which allow us to see how malnutrition is on the rise in Gaza. We’re able to see that from the admission data that we get into the clinics that we support and the hospitals that we support. We recently released a report on the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, so-called humanitarian, around the fact that these food distribution points were really just places where people were getting slaughtered.

I think it’s like 900 or so people have already been killed at those sites, if not more by now.

To be honest, it’s way more than that. From the medical places that MSF is supporting, whether we’re supporting field hospitals, hospitals, clinics, etc., whatever format that looks like in Gaza right now, because the medical system is completely decimated, we have seen over 1300 people come into our facilities, 70 of those being children as well. And we’re able to take that admission data, look at exactly where these wounds are, if they’re headshots, stomach shots, etc.—they are not warning shots—and put that in the format of reports and push that out via the channels that we have available to us, including in Australia.

So pushing that out to local media, that is something that we have chosen to do because in Gaza right now, we simply cannot meet the demand. We cannot continue to operate within the context that we are. We have limited supplies. We have doctors, nurses, everyone in those places working long shifts, passing out on shifts because they have no food themselves. We’re doing surgery by torchlight. We have no water, no electricity, over 300% at capacity.

So you’ve got that context. And then the amount of people that are coming in is exacerbated by the lack of food or the attacks that are happening when people are simply trying to get that food. So it comes to a point where there is no other option but to speak out. There’s no other option. If we are to remain silent, we’re actually not improving anything. We’re only further exacerbating the situation that we’re in, in which we cannot operate.

And those 900-plus local staff that are in there, it’s also their communities, it’s their families as well. So yeah, often you will, from an operational lens, really need to understand the levers that you’re pulling and whether this is going to better the situation, make it more difficult from a security or a risk perspective. In any crisis, you’re dealing with multiple different actors and you really need to work with those actors, often the Ministry of Health and other officials, to treat patients. But in the case of Gaza, we really are at that point. There’s no more dancing around this or trying to be more strategic. It’s just fact-based: go ahead, say what’s happening, because when we think it can’t get any worse, it’s getting worse.

Yeah. And Israel is acting with complete impunity. As I’ve said many times on this podcast, you made the mention you’ve got over 900 staff in there. How is that? And also noted your most recent public posts on the MSF website address a particular issue now that Israel has announced, or it’s already in place, in how humanitarian organizations operate in there, which is restricting the access. They’re requiring all of those organizations to provide details and names of all their staff that are working for them, including perhaps some of the patients that they’re treating. How is that impacting you on the ground? And why is that an issue? Most people don’t necessarily realize why that’s a conflict of the humanitarian ethos of the entire value proposition of a humanitarian organization. Why is that a problem for you and how might it impact your operations as well as other organizations?

At the moment, as we record this, there is the very real possibility that MSF and other INGOs will be pushed out of Gaza, which is terrifying. It’s horrific what could come. And as I said, that’s a very real possibility. The conditions in which MSF and other INGOs are allowed to be registered to provide aid in Gaza does include the need to provide names of our staff, of our patients. That’s an ethical red line, which we will not cross.

Just explain why, because some people might say, well, you know, there might be Hamas workers or whatever, you know, there might be Hamas militants.

I think we’re operating within a context where misinformation, disinformation, malinformation, harmful speech—this is surrounding everything that happens within Gaza at the moment. And so the trust of what will happen with confidential data which is handed over is not there. It is a security risk. It’s a security risk to our staff, to the people that we treat. We have had 12 colleagues killed since the start of the escalation of this war.

And we need to protect them as well and do everything we can to protect them too. And what we’re seeing now and what we have actually seen in the last two years is a weaponization of humanitarian aid. When you look at the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation feeding distribution points, they’re seen as death traps. It is a weaponization of aid and it can’t continue.

You need independent aid going into situations like this, like Gaza, to be able to provide directly to those people with independence and impartiality the care that they need. MSF does not have a political agenda. We have always been impartial, always been independent and neutral. And like so many other NGOs, we need to be able to conduct ourselves within that framework, within that humanitarian framework, to continue to deliver aid.

But these are just one of many consistent blockers which we’re experiencing to provide a rationale for why aid won’t be allowed into Gaza, which is just terrifying.

And again, social media is rife with images of Hamas militants stealing trucks and so on, which is a big counter narrative. It’s a huge counter narrative of Israel’s not holding the aid, they’re letting in all the aid that’s required, et cetera. What do you say to that response? Because that is a dominant narrative. It’s one that in Australia is dominant. And of course, far further, of course, particularly in the US and West more broadly. What do you say to that narrative?

In response to the fact that aid is getting in, it’s not true. It’s categorically untrue. Yes, there could be a drip feeding of trucks maybe coming in. There could be aid dropped from the sky. There could be these distribution points. It’s nowhere near meeting the need. It’s not even a fraction of what’s needed.

And I will just say, there’s such a focus on the fact that between the US and Israel, there’s food coming in. First of all, we’ve touched on what these distribution hubs are, and they do need to be shut down. What we can see from people trying to get aid there is not that they’re getting aid. They’re getting killed.

But in addition to that, you need to also understand that it’s so much more than food that we need and that the people of Gaza need. It’s electricity, it’s fuel, it’s medical supplies. At the beginning of this escalation, there were 126 incubators in Gaza. There’s now 36 incubators in Gaza. You can’t drop an incubator from the sky. You need to allow unimpeded aid into Gaza, which can only be done with a ceasefire.

And when you look at just that example of an incubator, right? You have five babies per incubator when there should only be one, which increases the chance of all five of those babies not surviving because of cross-contamination or them becoming ill. There are more premature babies in Gaza at the moment because there are more expectant mothers who are malnourished. So one in four pregnant women and children are malnourished, which was a statistic that we got from an epidemiological survey that we ran.

So more medical data showing this. We’ve got that because there’s no food coming in. We’re unable to adequately treat those expectant mothers. And then when those babies are born prematurely, we don’t have ultrasound machines, putting five babies in one incubator. You can start to see how there’s this distraction of, oh, one truck has come in or we’re dropping aid over here—it’s not enough.

And it’s not enough for the entire scale of need that is required right now in Gaza. And this is going to reverberate through generations, not only the trauma, the psychological trauma and the injuries, of course, but also when a child doesn’t have enough food, that leads to medical conditions, atrophy of organs. You can’t heal from that. You can’t heal from brain damage that’s happened because of atrophy from a lack of food. You can’t heal from critical organ damage.

So this is not just a case of dropping some food in and then things start to go back to normal. This is systematic genocide, tools of genocide which are unfolding here.

Of course, there are going to be reports coming out saying that trucks are attacked, etc. I would also say, look at the context in which those trucks are going into. This is a population which is dying. There is just an unimaginable need and desperateness for people to feed their families. This is going to happen. You need to look at the bigger context and understand how can we provide aid within a structure, which is a humanitarian structure, in order to meet this need.

And it’s not just sending one or two trucks in the middle of the night on dangerous roads that have been absolutely crawled through in order to see if there is anything nefarious in there and then half of those materials can no longer be used. It’s not that.

Yeah. What I don’t understand, really cannot wrap my mind around it, is how does Israel get away with it? I mean, it’s openly saying it’s the UN that’s holding the trucks and the UN is, you know, there’s food being wasted. What evidence do we have—footage we have, do you have people on the ground who are telling you, no, Israeli Defense Force is not opening the border? Because we’re seeing, I mean, there’s no counter narrative to the dominant narrative in social media at least, to show us Israel is blocking, the road’s blocked. What information, where do you draw your conclusions from?

We have activity managers, heads of mission. We have staff in Palestine, not just in Gaza, but in Jerusalem and the West Bank. And there is always a coordinated effort to get supplies in, whether that’s people, whether that’s medical supplies, whatever it is that’s needed.

And that is like a constant relationship which needs to be rolled out between different actors within this war to try and get aid in and all we can say is that it’s not getting in. You know it’s not for a lack of trying. The borders are closed. There is not enough aid coming in and those borders can be opened by Israel.

So I think at the end of the day we can only report on what we do and don’t have right now and what we don’t have is the medical equipment, the food, the water, the electricity, all of those necessities to be able to treat the people that we’re there to treat.

That really comes clear when one of our doctors who returned from Gaza recently said that for her, it was so hard to explain this when she was speaking to a mother whose child was unable to heal from the wounds they were suffering because they simply didn’t have the nutrition in order to heal from those wounds. They couldn’t regenerate. That’s something else that we’re seeing—burns, etc. They’re not healing because people aren’t physically well enough to support their body to heal, because they don’t have food or water.

And she’s explaining exactly that to this mother knowing that there is food kilometers away. How do you explain that? How do you say that there is a way to stop this? There is a way to feed people. There’s a way to treat people, but for some reason it’s not happening. That’s a breakdown of humanity.

To be able to explain that is just so incomprehensible from a rural perspective as well. So look, I think so many times, Maz, people feel that they really need to be really clued up in the geopolitics of this or the history of this conflict and really understand the evidence around certain things. But we all know what’s right and wrong.

We all really know what’s right and wrong. And yes, multiple truths can exist at once. What happened on October 7, what Hamas did was horrific. But what is happening now is also horrific. You can agree on both of those things. And I think that we’re all sitting here asking the exact question that you just asked. It’s an answer which won’t sit well morally, however you put it.

Yeah. Yeah. The morality of this is perplexing. I mean, I’ve talked about this from military ethicists through to people like yourself who are dealing in the humanitarian domain, but the ethics of it is just unfathomable. How we are allowing this to occur, you know, I’ve written about this, about never again, where the never again started, the irony of that cannot be lost on us. You know, when we coined that term was at the end of World War II and the Holocaust. Yet we’re now watching that very same social group carry out those very same atrocities. It’s beyond me. Can you just give us a bit more of an insight into the—you said there’s about a hundred international staff. I suspect many of those are doctors, but of course you’ve got logisticians, et cetera. Can you give us a little bit of a profile of them and maybe just build on a little bit more about the daily lived experience of those inside Gaza, perhaps extending on the doctor that you mentioned that had recently returned.

Yeah, 100 international staff in Gaza from all around the world. We have Australians and New Zealanders in there at the moment as well. We recently had a nurse and a doctor return. And one of the things that we do do, if those individuals are comfortable, is to have them do op-eds and speak to the media and provide

to the Australian or New Zealand audience exactly what they’re seeing as well from our own perspective.

But to come back to your question around what a day in the life of them sort of looks like, as I said earlier, there is not one functioning hospital in Gaza at the moment. 97% of the medical facilities have been reduced to rubble or basically non-functional. So what you’re looking at is field hospitals or other different types of medical outposts, which we’re trying to support.

So as a doctor in Gaza at the moment, you are first of all probably experiencing a lot of difficulties in just trying to get to the hospital. We know that the constant threat of attack is something that is always front of mind. We’ve had hospitals attacked as people are working within them.

When you do eventually get to the hospital, which isn’t easy, especially if you’re stopped and you need to wait and be held for hours in open areas where these attacks could occur. When you eventually get in, the first thing is you’re just met with the overwhelming capacity.

We have a lot of people who are coming to these locations and the really sad reality of that is that we’re over capacity in turning people away by 9 a.m. We simply don’t have the means to meet everyone. And what that means is that only the most critical of injuries, illnesses, etc. can be treated at the moment. So that triage system is extremely hard to manage.

When people are being treated, it’s often not to the sort of experience or expectation that an Australian doctor would conduct themselves in Australia. And that is not for lack of skill and empathy. It’s completely because we don’t have in Gaza all of the medical supplies required.

A good example that many people were horrified by is the lack of anaesthesia—having to do amputations without anaesthesia, even having to treat bandages on burn victims without anaesthesia as well. A lack of water, electricity going out, as I said earlier, having to do surgeries by torchlight, having patients in between beds. So not only do you have patients in beds, sometimes multiple patients per bed, you then have them in between the beds as well. And you also have them outside.

And I think it just gets worse and worse. We’re seeing infections which are resistant to antibiotics at the moment. That’s something else that happens in contexts like this. Obviously, the malnutrition is of extreme concern to us.

I know that there have been several times when our doctors and nurses and logisticians and heads of mission and all of those people, even the people that are there to clean the blood off the floor, right? All of these people at times, especially our international mobile staff, have had to evacuate, have had to leave and just feel that they’re leaving these people behind. They’re leaving behind their colleagues and their comrades and people that they are standing in solidarity with.

I think, for an internationally mobile staff member, being able to come back to Australia or New Zealand or whatever country they have come from, it’s quite hard for them to be able to share exactly what they’ve seen. And even as we’re speaking now, I can quite calmly tell you these things and say, it’s this, it’s that, it’s these numbers or these patients or this amount of children, but we’re so geographically removed from the situation we almost get the benefit of doing that.

But I think when you come home, we see so many of our staff wanting to go back. They want to go back and keep helping. And that’s not something that would leave you easily.

Yeah. I mean, how do you assist your staff with their own mental health traumas? Because I suspect, I mean, I’m former military and there’s many of my peers who’ve suffered tremendously because of the things they’ve seen or the things they were part of. I imagine in Gaza, this is a very different level of trauma that people are exposed to. What sort of measures do you have in place to ensure the mental health of your staff?

Yeah, so we take it very seriously. Often when people think of organizations like MSF, they don’t actually realize that we do a lot of mental health care with our patients. One of our doctors who has been in Gaza, actually she was there last year, she’s a psychologist that worked with the children there. So it is a very big aspect of what we do.

In terms of our staff, there is a psychological session before staff go in. It is a very specific context in which people are choosing to go into, ensuring that we know that they are prepared for that physically and mentally is obviously a really big aspect of what we do from a duty of care perspective.

There is that ongoing psychosocial support whilst they’re within Gaza. It also extends obviously to when they come out and it’s not as though there is some three months post-mission period and then that’s done. That’s forever essentially. There are peer support networks as well because as I touched on, you and I can have this conversation but I think to have that with someone who’s also had that lived experience is much different.

You can connect on a different level and you can have that honesty and so we have that peer support network in place as well. So there is a lot of emotional and psychological support and that’s all we can really do. At the end of the day we have a profile of incredible staff who make this decision to go into these contexts, whether it’s Gaza, whether it’s Sudan, whether it’s somewhere else in the world impacted by conflict or a natural disaster, and it’s for various different reasons. There are so many different reasons why people feel called to do this.

Yeah, I mean, incredibly brave to, you know, this perhaps only in the beginning. I’m now interested to, we’ve touched a lot about the bearing witness piece and this is part of it. I mean, your, you know, this podcast is part of bearing witness, but I suspect you get a lot of heat undoubtedly in Australia, but certainly globally. What pressures are you under? Let’s talk about Australia and New Zealand. I mean, is the Israeli lobby in Australia, the Zionist Federation of Australia, etc., are they exercising any pressure on you when you put out these quite impactful reports? Do you have to deal with that? Is that something that’s another battleground that remains outside of the public discourse, so to speak?

Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s just a factor, as I said, in any type of conflict where you have multiple actors and then you have MSF, which operates independently and from a neutral perspective and as impartial as possible using medical data to say this is what we’re seeing. It is always going to be responded to by someone who doesn’t agree with that.

So of course, we need to continue to make sure that we are rooted in that evidence when we come out with reports or facts or anything that we’re saying, it absolutely needs to be able to be verified. And that is what we do.

So every time we come out with a report, I referenced earlier this report that we released on the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and the sharp increase in deaths that we’re seeing of people trying to receive food aid. That report came out and that was met by dispute by the IDF. And so again, we just need to go back to the data that we have pulled on to put together this report, the evidence that we have. We put out a public statement sharing that evidence, but it’s not about getting into a back and forth around this, you know, we’re not politicians.

We are here to improve the context and situation of the people that we’re there to help. That is what we’re here to do. As I said before, misinformation, disinformation, malinformation—it’s nothing new. It is always going to happen. MSF will often find ourselves being used or misquoted or attacked because of our mandate of bearing witness. So again, we just need to make sure that everything that we’re saying is rooted in that evidence and can be verified. And that is where we come from at the end of the day.

How do you ensure this level of impartiality, especially when you’re relying on funding, I guess, to do what you do?

So being an independent organisation is a benefit to us, which essentially means that we’re not receiving government funding. So when you look at other INGOs, UNICEF, for example, or the ICRC, there is funding there which would be tied to their inability to speak out from a—not a political perspective, but from a bearing witness perspective.

When you make these decisions, you’re always thinking about if we do this, what is the impact onto the patient? The patient is the North Star. You make decisions to better improve the conditions and the situation of the people that we’re there to help, but also the security of our staff as well as a factor in all of this and our ability to continue.

I can imagine that if we were to say something which would compromise our ability to receive funding and therefore impact our ability to help patients, then yes, that would be a very serious decision to be made. At MSF, we don’t have that. So we are able to maintain that independence and speak out as we see it without fear of losing funding.

It just means that as an organization, we rely so heavily on private funding. It’s something that is the backbone of MSF, it always has been, it always will be. But if we were to start taking government funding, it would compromise our independence and our ability to be neutral and to bear witness.

And that’s rather unique, is it?

It is unique. Yeah. I mean, I think you look at other, as I said, other INGOs and there are links to being able to be funded from other governments, even the World Food Program, for example. But you also look at USAID and how that is completely dismantling at the moment and how that’s also impacting some of the other actors in the sector, and now their inability to meet the need, which is horrific.

There are vaccination programs or other treatment programs which have just stopped because they can’t pay staff. They can’t afford the materials or the transport required. What that means is that the need for MSF is growing. But at the same time, MSF can’t do everything. We are a production line. We all work together. And when one part of that production line is gone, it impacts us all.

Well, as you said, with all the restrictions being placed on INGOs, MSF included, right at the start, you mentioned that there’s a real risk of you having to cease your operations in Gaza. Then what? Is that where we’re at? I mean, there’s no journalists, there’s no foreign journalists in Gaza. We know that, that’s been the status quo essentially from the start. It’s essentially local journalists who are then being killed en masse, the most journalists killed in any conflict in living memory, 270 I think and counting, since the latest outbreak of violence post October 7th. What does that mean for Gaza? I mean, if now you are being constricted so much that an organization like MSF, an independent organization, independently funded organization might not be able to get access to Gaza. What’s that mean? Where are we?

Yeah, it’s pretty horrific to be honest. Look, the 900 local staff that we have in Gaza—we’ll continue to support them. They’re Gazans, right? They’re there and we will do everything we can to support them and be there for them. So MSF will never truly go out of Gaza. We’ve been there for over 20 years. Our staff will remain there.

But that ability for us to bear witness and to bring that back to the international community, that will be impacted 100%. And as you said, without any international eyes in Gaza at the moment, no international media allowed, potentially a blackout of what we’re seeing, what we’re able to bear witness to. It’s wait and see at the moment. It’s terrifying. It would be a genocide amplified, it would just be a humanitarian crisis like we haven’t seen before in recent age.

And yeah, it’s a very real reality that this might happen. But we just have to maintain our support of our staff in Gaza as much as we possibly can. In reality, if it did happen, it would look like further blockade on getting aid into Gaza, whether that be supplies, food, etc., even the ability to do bank transfers into Gaza as well to pay staff. But it’s just a continuous strangulation of the humanitarian sector. It’s getting tighter and tighter.

Where’s the biggest choke point? I’ve said it time and time again, and I’ve written about this. I don’t think it’s up to Israel anymore to stop this. Israel is incapable of stopping. They’ve gone too far. They’re too morally degraded. There are too many dominant narratives in Israel alone that this is an existential threat. So I actually don’t think Israel can stop this. It’s too far gone. Same as Hamas can’t stop. Hamas is also too far gone. They will fight until they no longer exist. Who can change this then? Where is the biggest roadblock that you see as an organization that’s living and breathing the horrors of Gaza?

I mean, look, MSF, we can share what we’re seeing in the hopes that politicians will use every political tool at their disposal to help stop this. That’s what we can do. And we continue to stand for the Palestinian people to have rights—the right to live, the right to survive, humanitarian rights. That’s what we stand for.

What will bring an end to this? I’m not sure. I mean, we know that in September at the UN, there’s going to be more words spoken, but words don’t feed people. Words won’t stop this. There needs to be action. What we’re calling for is first and foremost a ceasefire. There needs to be a ceasefire because we simply will not be able to A) meet the current demand and B) stop the increase in demand from malnutrition, from attacks, from gunshot wounds at food distribution centers, unless there is a ceasefire.

So all we can do is hope that we’re able to continue to operate and that a ceasefire will be introduced so that we can immediately scale up this aid, because the reality of what is happening and what could potentially happen—as you sort of said, this is something that we’re all going to look back on, and it’s often being called a collective stain on the human consciousness. And in many years to come, we’ll be asked what we did.

And that’s a question that we ask ourselves, we always ask, are we doing as much as we can? Are we pushing forward? And that’s where, again, back to the start where témoignage comes in. And that’s not just us putting out press releases or reports or things like that, or even this important conversation that you and I are having. It’s bilateral conversations with government. It’s multilateral conversations. It’s having an audience at the UN Security Council. It’s being able to show from an evidence-based perspective, this is what’s happening. That is what we bring to the table. And we’ll continue to do that for absolutely as long as we can.

Very courageous work. My last question to you is you are privately funded through private donors. So how can people support the work that you do, not just in Gaza, but around the world?

Donate, really. We have so many programs as you said around the world. Sudan is a huge crisis at the moment which is often not getting as much media attention. We’ve just learned as of yesterday there’s a massive cholera outbreak in Sudan which again is further exacerbating a horrific situation there.

We know that we’re talking about malnutrition in Gaza. This is something that’s being seen in Nigeria at the moment to a catastrophic scale, with plans to expand the hospital in one location in Nigeria so it would be three times the size of one in Sydney. That’s just to meet the demand.

So, these are just a few things that MSF is working on in any location around the world, whether it’s through preventable measures such as vaccinations or trying to help people who are fleeing from conflict or who are displaced. But it does need funding. I think for us, we’ve been so fortunate to receive so much public support for Gaza. And that’s mostly because we’re living through a war where we’re seeing the footage of this firsthand, we’re seeing these images of these children.

And it’s really inspiring people to take action by donating and supporting organisations like us, which is just—we can’t do what we do without that funding. As we’ve said, we don’t take government funding. We rely on donations from the general public.

But what I would also encourage is just untied funding. A lot of the time, if a conflict is forgotten and it’s not in the media cycle, like Sudan, it’s harder for us to raise money and to put efforts there. So being able to receive unrestricted funding also allows us to respond where it’s needed most, even if it’s not the particular crisis that’s getting the media’s attention.

And another thing that MSF does is that we are very quick to respond when there are natural disasters as well. We were ready to go after news of the very large earthquake that happened two weeks ago. We’ve got a program in Kiribati. We were afraid that that was going to go underwater. We were ready to deploy there. So there’s a need for us to remain ready as well, which is also something that we respond to and need funding for.

Absolutely. On that note, Ashley, I don’t want to take much more of your time. I know you’ve got bigger and better things to do in your day to day. But thank you very much. I think you’ve given us an insight into what your staff face in Gaza, but also what you as an organization are trying to do to, as we said time and time again, bear witness to something that I wholeheartedly agree will remain a stain on our collective consciousness. This is not something that we should be talking about lightly or just shrugging off and scrolling past lightly. This is a genocide being carried out ultimately in Australia’s case, partially in our name because of our military relations and as a former military member, I’m quite disturbed by that. So thank you again, what you do for all your staff, particularly those on the front lines of these horrible conflicts. Thanks a lot.

Thanks, Maz. And I just want to say thank you for having this conversation. It’s so important. And something that we often come back to is MSF was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999. And a big reason for that was the work we do around bearing witness. And the international president at the time, Dr. James Orbinski, he said, whilst we know that words cannot always save, silence can certainly kill.

So it’s a really, really important reason for us to have conversations like this. So thank you for your time.

Thank you and thank you for the goosebumps you just gave me. I’ll be in touch.

Thanks.