Film Screening | Gaza: Doctors under Attack

CCMS and partners screened the BBC documentary Doctors Under Attack, followed by a panel discussion that explained the realities faced by medical professionals in Gaza.

Details

IDRF, in partnership with BC Muslim & Arab Professionals, BC Physicians Against Genocide, Independent Jewish Voices, Centre for Comparative Muslim Studies, and The Project on Palestine Studies, invites you to a powerful screening of Gaza: Doctors Under Attack — an award-winning documentary that sheds light on the realities faced by healthcare workers and the extreme conditions under which medical care continues in Gaza.\About the Panelists

Heba Al-Nashef

Heba Al-Nashef is a highly experienced Registered Midwife. She is of Arab heritage (Palestinian and Syrian) and speaks English and Arabic fluently. Heba grew up in Amman, Jordan, where she earned her Bachelor’s degree in Midwifery in 2008, followed by a Master’s degree in Midwifery from Nottingham, UK, in 2011.

Soon after graduating, Heba immigrated to Canada to pursue a model of midwifery rooted in evidence-based practice and informed choice. She began her Canadian career at the birth centre in Winnipeg, Manitoba, where she supported a 50% out-of-hospital birth rate and worked with many clients to achieve physiologic birth.

In 2016, Heba’s love for her family, the mountains, and the ocean brought her to Vancouver. She worked in downtown Vancouver, specializing in caring for Arab, Muslim, and refugee families. She later transitioned to a high-volume practice at the South Community Birth Program to support work–life balance, where she served families for four years.

Heba also holds a leadership role as Assistant Head of the Department of Midwifery at St. Paul’s Hospital (SPH), where she works collaboratively with Family Practice. In 2024, she participated in a humanitarian mission to Gaza with a Canadian NGO, providing care to women and their babies in extremely challenging birthing conditions.

In her practice, she is dedicated to delivering premium-quality and client-centred care, with a strong focus on evidence-based practice and physiologic birth. She is thrilled to meet clients and support them and their families throughout their care.

When she is not catching babies, Heba enjoys cooking, reading, travelling, spending quality time with her family and her fluffy cat, and training in mixed martial arts, including Brazilian jiu-jitsu.

Douglas Courtemanche

I am a pediatric plastic surgeon and craniofacial surgeon in Vancouver. I am a clinical professor in the Department of Surgery at UBC. I look after patients, help my colleagues, teach and do research. I am semi-retired after 35 years in practice. I am deeply involved in environmental and social justice, working with Doctors for Planetary Health - West Coast, BC-CAPE, BC Physicians Against Genocide and having recently join the Human Rights and Climate Change Working Group that reports to the UN. I have been taken to task in my Hospital and my Health Authority by both administrators and colleagues for speaking up about the genocide in Palestine and presenting at a Zoom meeting with a watermelon background. Our BC-PAG group has been working with the Equity and Inclusion Office at UBC and the new Dean of Medicine to try and change the way in which health care workers and trainees are educated about anti-semitism and anti-Palestinian racism so that this might be seen as a parallel process to the required anti-indigenous racism training that we all take. I remain completely against the actions of the IOF in Gaza and the West Bank. These amount to war crimes. I don’t know why it is so hard for others to accept the reality and speak up against what is going on.

Jean Gelinas

Dr. Gelinas is a British Columbia-based anesthesiologist, critical care specialist, and environmental advocate with extensive experience working, sailing, and backpacking throughout the Global South. As a young physician, his firsthand experiences with South African apartheid and the conflicts in the African Great Lakes region deeply informed his perspective on systemic inequality and human rights, which he later applied to his observations of the situation in Palestine. In addition to his clinical work, Dr. Gelinas is an associate professor of anesthesiology at a Canadian university and a health-tech innovator who founded a company focused on digitizing and analyzing the patient phenotype.

Malcolm Steinberg

Dr. Steinberg has extensive experience in research programme management, health strategy, policy and programme development and evaluation, chronic disease management, public health consulting in Sub-Saharan Africa and South East Asia, and public health teaching. Dr. Steinberg has managed two national health programmes in South Africa (Occupational Health Epidemiology Unit of the National Centre for Occupational Health and the National HIV/AIDS Programme of the Medical Research Council). He also co-founded and led an occupational health NGO to support health and safety programs for the emerging black trade union movement in South Africa and later set up and led an independent health consulting company specialising in HIV/AIDS until it was acquired by Abt Associates. Dr Steinberg moved to Vancouver in 2004 and is currently a Physician Epidemiologist with the Division of STI/HIV Prevention and Control at the BC Centre for Disease Control with a cross appointment in the Health Sciences Faculty at SFU. He is currently involved with two research projects. He is leading a 5-year CIHR study to investigate acute HIV infection in gay men and is a co-principal investigator in a study in Uganda to investigate HPV self collection as a screening approach for cervical cancer.