Chicago-area emergency room doctor Thaer Ahmad will never forget one of the first times he had to declare a patient dead in Gaza’s Nasser Hospital.
A father carried in his three daughters after their house was bombed in the middle of the night.
“I remember the father basically asking us, telling us, ‘Hey, it’s only been five minutes. Please, it’s only been five minutes. I brought them right over, do something,’” Ahmad recounted in an interview with WBEZ. “And you know just by looking at them that there’s nothing you can do, and that they’re gone.”
Ahmad took out his stethoscope and searched for their heartbeats anyway. The girls lay on the floor, Ahmad on his knees, with their father standing over them.
“I know there’s no heartbeat… And I’m not looking up because I can’t look at him. I don’t know what to say, so one of my Palestinian colleagues has to break the news to him,” Ahmad said. “Those are those moments that you can’t return from, ever.”
Ever since he returned, Ahmad has been trying to get back to helping people in Gaza, but he said he has been denied entry four times, twice by the Israeli government.
Instead, Ahmad has joined a handful of Chicago-area doctors who’ve worked in Gaza’s hospitals and are sharing their experiences with Illinois lawmakers, trying to get them to sign on to a bill restricting weapons sales to Israel. The doctors have been meeting with members of the Chicago-area Congressional delegation and other political leaders, urging them to speak out against Israel’s starvation of Palestinians in Gaza, where famine has been declared, and settler violence in the West Bank.
Illinois’ Congressional delegation and other leaders have grown more intolerant of Israel’s near total blockade on food and medical supplies to Gaza as the war wages on, but the doctors have seen mixed results as elected officials continue to walk a political tightrope. According to the Gaza Health Ministry, Israel has killed more than 60,000 Palestinians and displaced at least 1.9 million people – about 90% of Gaza’s population – in the nearly two years since the Hamas attack that killed 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals and saw 250 people taken hostage, with 50 hostages remaining.
‘One of the worst’ meetings, but signs of momentum
On a recent Friday morning, Ahmad set up in his dining room to join members of Jewish Voice for Peace in a virtual meeting with U.S. Rep. Lauren Underwood.
They were optimistic that Underwood, a registered nurse who has advocated for affordable health insurance and lowering maternal mortality, would be open to their pleas. In late July, she signed onto a letter calling for humanitarian aid to enter Gaza.
But by the end of the 30-minute call, their hope that Underwood would commit to the legislation limiting weapons sales was gone.
“She sat almost mute for a half hour and ended the meeting with not even an expression of, ‘I’m concerned, I care,’” said Marty Levine, with Jewish Voice for Peace-Chicago.
Ahmad called it “by far one of the worst” meetings he has been in and said he has “had better meetings with really staunch pro-Israeli Republicans.”
In a brief statement, a spokesperson for Underwood said she told the advocates she “would be happy to take a look at that piece of legislation,” but didn’t answer further questions about Underwood’s position on arms sales to Israel.
But Levine and Ahmad both said the discouraging meeting with Underwood felt like an outlier. That’s because as the war stretches into its 23rd month, Chicago-area Democrats are starting to speak out more forcefully against Israel’s actions in Gaza.
Among the Chicago-area delegation, Reps. Jesús “Chuy” Garcia, Jonathan Jackson, Danny Davis, Jan Schakowsky and Robin Kelly support Rep. Delia Ramirez’s “Block the Bombs” bill. The measure would restrict Israel’s access to the “worst-offending offensive” weapons supplied by the United States, such as massive bunker busting bombs designed to rip through concrete before exploding.
“These are the bombs that we know — we’ve seen the research and investigations — have in fact been used to kill people in Gaza, that have violated international law, human rights law,” Ramirez said in an interview with WBEZ.
“Illinois has the largest Palestinian diaspora in the entire country,” she said. “Illinois needs to step up and demonstrate that we care about our constituents in Illinois, and that means that members of Congress from this delegation need to sign onto this bill.”
The U.S. Palestinian Community Network is also urging officials to sign the bill. Organizer Nick Sous sees Schakowsky’s endorsement as a major win. But he said there is still a long way to go.
“If a progressive Democrat like Jan Schakowsky, who constantly says she’s a staunch supporter of Israel, has finally come to the conclusion and realization that there needs to be an arms embargo, why haven’t any other Democrats?”
Kelly is the most recent Illinois Democrat to sign onto the proposal. She added her name Friday after her team met with doctors and advocates and she committed to “taking a serious look at” Ramirez’s bill.
“This bill still affirms a secure Israel, which I continue to support, but I cannot stand by silently as children starve to death. All Palestinians and Israelis want to live in peace and with dignity,” Kelly said in a statement to WBEZ before she signed on.
Reps. Underwood, Bill Foster, Mike Quigley, Sean Casten, Brad Schneider and Raja Krishnamoorthi have not signed on. Spokespeople for most of those members highlighted other statements they’ve made criticizing the ongoing crisis. Spokespeople for Foster and Krishnamoorthi said they have both signed onto a letter being sent this week to Secretary of State Marco Rubio imploring President Donald Trump to use his “full power and authority to demand that the Israeli government immediately facilitate a massive surge of ready-to-feed infant formula into Gaza.”
Ramirez urged her colleagues to go beyond statements which “feel very empty for constituents, especially for constituents in the state of Illinois who have families who have direct ties to Gaza and who have seen dozens of their family die.”
Ahmad has asked for a meeting with Krishnamoorthi and other candidates running to replace Sen. Dick Durbin. Kelly is also running for the seat. Ahmad says he wants to see Durbin’s successor be outspoken on Gaza, given Durbin was the first U.S. Senator to call for a ceasefire.
In the Senate, Sen. Tammy Duckworth voted to block arms sales to Israel last month “as famine ravishes Gaza,” a statement of hers read. Organizers saw it as a marked shift from April when Duckworth, an Iraq War veteran, voted against an identical measure.
Ahmad said he believes the “wind is blowing” in a different direction now.
“The images that have surfaced of starving children, people in tents, having to run from bombs, showing up to these sites where they’re supposed to be getting food, but they end up in body bags – I think that the average American is just really disturbed by that,” Ahmad said.
Growing famine prompts new criticism
Ahmad said he was denied entry into Gaza from Jordan in June. He was hoping to bring in a basic necessity: baby formula.
“And when I talk about ‘I’m bringing in formula’ — I’m smuggling in formula,” Ahmad said. “I’m putting it in between my scrubs.”
Ahmad said he was denied entry before ever getting to a security checkpoint.
One of his colleagues tried to “smuggle” formula just a week later, Ahmad said, “but they searched his bag and they found 10 boxes of the infant formula and dumped all 10 of them before he got in.”
A spokesperson for the Consulate General of Israel to the Midwest did not answer whether it is Israeli policy to disallow doctors to enter with baby formula. The spokesperson said Israel has distributed baby food and formula and blamed the slow pace of aid on the United Nations and “international organizations on the Gaza side of the crossings.” Israeli officials have denied that Gaza is experiencing a famine, despite the declaration by the world’s authority on hunger and food crises.
The IPC-declared famine in Gaza and images of extreme hunger appear to be striking a new chord with Illinois leaders.
Gov. JB Pritzker earlier this month said blocking arms sales to Israel would send “the right kind of message.”
“[W]hich is that Israel needs to make sure that the food assistance that ought to go to innocent Palestinians should arrive there,” he said on NBC’s Meet the Press. “And they should do everything in their power to prevent the starvation that I think we’ve all seen.”
Last week, Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss — in his capacity as a Congressional candidate in Illinois’ 9th District — wrote a 700-word Substack post advocating for a Palestinian state and condemning the widespread man-made hunger.
“The starvation of children is not an inevitability. It is a choice, and we must make a different choice,” wrote Biss, who once booted his running mate from his gubernatorial campaign for not condemning the divest-from-Israel movement.
Levine, the Jewish Voice for Peace-Chicago leader, said the more forceful statements help create policy change by “validating the voices on the street.”
Aside from food, Ahmad says requests for supplies from Palestinian doctors run the gamut, from glucose monitors for diabetic patients, to IV medicine for an increasing number of cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome, a typically rare condition that is growing in Gaza. The condition causes the body’s immune system to attack the nerves and causes paralysis.
An imperfect proposal, but a way to speak out
In the meeting with Underwood, Ahmad read the dying will of a 10-year-old girl named Rasha who was killed in an Israeli airstrike last year.
“I hope my clothes will be given to those in need,” Rasha wrote. “My accessories should be shared between Rahaf, Sara, Judy, Lana and Batool. My bead kits should go to Ahmed and Rahaf. My monthly allowance, 50 shekels, 25 to Rahaf and 25 to Ahmed. My stories and notebooks to Rahaf, my toys to Batool and please do not yell at my brother Ahmed.”
The physician is glad to see people speaking out against the famine, but he wants to make sure people don’t forget that children are still being killed by Israeli bombs.
“[The blockade] is this really devastating aspect, and I haven’t even mentioned that there are still fighter jets bombing, and … there is talk of expanding the military activity on the ground,” Ahmad said.
According to the Gaza Health Ministry, more than 18,000 kids have been killed in Gaza since October 2023.
In that same timeframe, the United States has sent tens of thousands of weapons to Israel, many through “quietly approved” sales that evaded public scrutiny because they fell under a monetary threshold that requires Congressional notification, according to the Washington Post.
In addition to restricting sales of bunker-busting bombs, Ramirez’s measure would limit the sale of “Joint Direct Attack Munition” devices that convert “dumb bombs” into precision bombs, the fragments of which were found in the rubble of destroyed homes following strikes that killed 19 children and 24 adults, according to an investigation by Amnesty International.
Weapons that use white phosphorus would also be limited. It’s a chemical that can cause “deep and severe burns, penetrating even through bone,” according to the World Health Organization.
Under the bill, the United States could only sell these weapons to Israel with Congressional approval if the government explains how the weapons would be used and has written assurances from Israel that it would follow international human rights laws.
Sous, with USPCN, said advocates don’t think it’s a perfect proposal, but “it is a tangible act that we as people who are represented by these elected officials, can call on them to sign.”
“We also recognize that this is the bare minimum to get us to a point where the genocide in Palestine is coming to an end.”
Ramirez’s bill is a longshot. But Levine with Jewish Voice for Peace is still calling on all elected officials to speak out right now.
“It is what I think the Jewish community in the 30s would have expected from more American leaders about what was happening in Nazi Germany — that more people would have been willing to put their reputations on the line to say: ‘This is a horror that cannot be allowed to pass,’” Levine said. “In moments of moral crisis, we’re called to act and speak, not worrying about ‘Does it have an effect tomorrow?’ Because we’ll be there tomorrow to take the next step.”