The logistics of getting aid into Gaza and flooded Pakistan

A paralysed teenager and the nurse who decided his career

The conversation opens far from any war zone. Muzamil asks Hafiz ur Rehman where he grew up, and the answer is a village near Talagang, a school teacher’s home, an early move to Wah Cantt. Ordinary, humble. Then, in his metric year, a viral infection that he would only diagnose decades later — as a doctor, looking back — as Guillain-Barré syndrome. It moved from his chest to his limbs. Both legs paralysed. A month in POF Hospital. The expectation, plainly stated to a teenager, that he would spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair.

Two people in that hospital set the course of everything that followed. One was a male nurse named Adalat, who carried him to the washroom, washed his hands and feet, did the work that sat far outside any job description. The other was Dr. Mohammad Kamal, the physician who had referred him, who finished his clinic at four and came back daily to check on a patient he was not related to and owed nothing. In the next room, a rabies patient was dying; Hafiz ur Rehman remembers the animal sounds the disease forces out of a body at the end, and he remembers a doctor downstairs refusing to come up — “let him die, call me when he’s gone and I’ll write the certificate.”

He lay there and made a decision. He would enter the field of health. If he could become a doctor, he would; if not, he would become a nurse like Adalat. He recovered, slower than most, a year lost to weakness. He is still standing on those legs fifty years later. He became a doctor, a specialist, a professor, a principal, and now dean of three colleges. The origin story matters because it explains the register he speaks in for the rest of the episode — service as something owed, not chosen.

Why relief is an obligation, not volunteerism

Before the logistics, Hafiz ur Rehman wants the frame right. Muzamil raises a familiar worry: that Pakistan’s social fabric has frayed, that the talk of ethics and morality he heard as a child in the nineties has thinned out, that religion has been pushed into a corner. The doctor agrees, but locates the cause precisely. Over the last five hundred years, he argues, the strings connecting faith to conduct were cut — a process he traces through a slogan he says emerged in the West, “medicine is medicine, nothing to do with religion.” Sever that string and morality is left to be defined by individual reasoning and consensus, both of which bend. “Human reasoning — how strong can it be?” he asks. “Today some reasons, tomorrow others.” Add pressure groups, he and Muzamil agree, and definitions get pulled left and right toward whoever’s interest is loudest.

His own tradition, he insists, does not push religion into the mosque and the madrassa and a maulvi’s hands. It starts somewhere else entirely: with the idea that all of creation is ayal-ullah, God’s family — Muslim, Christian, anyone. “Your duty is to look after them. That’s where it begins.” So the relief work that the rest of the episode describes is not, in his telling, charity at all. “It’s an obligation.” If your neighbour’s house is on fire and you can bear it, he says, your understanding of religion is broken. That is the lens he then applies to Gaza and to the floods.

How aid actually moves into a sealed Gaza

Muzamil presses on the thing that confused him in the foundation’s marketing: how can relief reach Gaza at all when the border is shut, no money flows in, and aid trucks sit stalled at the Rafah crossing? Hafiz ur Rehman starts by making the listener sit inside the scale. A strip 41 kilometres long, seven to eleven wide. 2.2 million people, more than half of them children — a growing population, not a greying one. By the thirtieth day of the war, 1.5 million of those 2.2 million were homeless, because more than 200,000 buildings had been levelled. Of 35 hospitals, 16 had closed; of 72 medical centres, around 70% had shut, much of it for lack of fuel. Roughly 10,000 killed, around 4,000 of them children, with 25,000 injured.

His answer to “how” is that you do not start when the war starts. Al Khidmat had been working in Gaza since 2019 — roughly PKR 18.5 crore over three years — so its jackets, offices, and partner NGOs were already inside. On day one of the war the foundation committed PKR 10 crore and contacted five organisations it already worked with, chief among them Turkey’s IHH. The mechanism is layered. Partners who already store consumables and food inside Gaza — people who, in his phrase, “have learned how to stay alive” — buy locally and distribute. A second route runs material from Nur Khan airbase toward Al Arish, the airport near Rafah, where Egypt’s Red Crescent receives it, hands it to the Israeli side for inspection at the Gaza boundary, then reloads and sends it back through Rafah to Palestinian hands. A third buys directly in Cairo through the Red Crescent and an Egyptian food body. And behind all of it sits an alternate legal route: Al Khidmat is registered in six other countries, so fundraising in the US and UK can move money where Pakistani dollars cannot.

The human-resource side is its own story. The foundation launched a portal for doctors and paramedics willing to deploy to a field hospital it hopes to build near Gaza, in coordination with Turkey for equipment and the WHO for facilitation. 2,245 people filled it out with full passport data — and 45% of them were women, a figure Hafiz ur Rehman offers as a quiet correction to anyone who assumes Pakistani women won’t go. He notes the experience behind the offer: when the Turkey earthquake hit, the foundation put 47 trained search-and-rescue workers on the ground within hours. In Gaza, 1,200 children are believed buried under rubble with no one to dig them out. By the recording date of 5 November, around PKR 1.5 billion — roughly five to six million dollars — had come in, raised, he admits, without the aggressive campaigning the foundation is capable of.

The flood that displaced an eighth of a nation

The pivot to the 2022 floods is, in a sense, the harder half of the episode, because the cameras have moved on. Hafiz ur Rehman describes driving from Sukkur through Jaffarabad to Sibi with water standing on both sides of the road like a sea — the only way to cross the country north to south was a single ribbon of road, everything to the left and right submerged. Thirty-three million displaced, which both men keep returning to: close to an eighth of the population, out of their homes, on the road.

What the foundation did first was rescue. Volunteers tied charpais together as makeshift rafts and pulled people out of water that was visibly raging beneath them. Then relief: cooked food twice a day, around 60 tent villages, thousands of tents, mobile filtration plants for clean water, and twelve air-conditioned mobile health units kitted with a clinic, ultrasound, and laboratory. Roughly PKR 10 arab went into that rescue-and-relief phase. Muzamil makes the point that an infrastructure crisis at this volume is always a health crisis underneath — standing water breeds dengue and cholera, hygiene collapses, sanitary supplies vanish — and the doctor confirms it was exactly that.

The organisational edge he keeps coming back to is people. Al Khidmat runs on a volunteer leadership layer over a salaried managerial core; in a disaster, 60,000 registered volunteers mobilise, with countless more unregistered. Those volunteers are not only hands. They are the data-collection apparatus — identifying who needs what, where, so the next phase isn’t guesswork.

Rehabilitation that’s targeted instead of charitable

The most useful stretch of the conversation is about what comes after the tents. Hafiz ur Rehman is sharp about the failure mode: Pakistani charity tends to be untargeted and proximate, reaching whoever is nearby and already at “a certain level of survival,” while the genuinely destitute — the out-of-school children, the families in interior Sindh and Balochistan whose hunger has affected their bodies, their minds, and their future productivity — go unreached.

His counter-examples are deliberately small and concrete. One project registered 8,000 smallholder farmers, each with five acres or less, gave them orientation, and sowed wheat across 40,000 acres for PKR 60 crore — putting roughly 80,000 people back on their feet through one harvest rather than one meal. Then a figure surfaced from UNICEF and WHO that reframed the emergency: 650,000 women in flood-affected areas were pregnant and due to deliver within four months, most of them with no home and no hospital. The foundation built a programme it called “safe mother, safe family,” with a target of 50,000 safe deliveries — training lady health workers, running antenatal screening through the mobile units, distributing nutrition and hygiene kits, and introducing safe-birthing kits for women who couldn’t reach a facility. For housing, he is honest about the limits: not big houses, but one room plus a toilet, matched to need rather than idealism.

Looking forward, the foundation has selected 15 union councils — ten in upper Sindh, five in Balochistan — to focus on health and education, echoing the line he attributes to Mahathir: govern by giving the people health and education and let them do the rest. The aim is schools, skills centres, and a shift in conduct visible enough that, as he puts it, you’d actually see Islam in how a place treats its surroundings — not just hear the call to prayer while cans get thrown from a moving car on the motorway.

Trust the youth, and don’t surrender hope

The episode closes on the generational question, and the two of them trade an unusually candid exchange. Muzamil notes that the Pakistan he inherited was built by his elders, so “somewhere, in your time, something went wrong” — and Hafiz ur Rehman accepts the charge without defensiveness. His generation made mistakes and bears responsibility. But two-thirds of the country is now young, a growing nation rather than a greying one, and that population is the variable that decides everything.

His evidence is small and earned. A clean-and-green push in Lahore had university students plant 250,000 saplings in three months, at their own expense — they paid, they came, they planted. A student-organised camp ended with one young organiser standing up and saying only: “Trust your youth, they will amaze you.” The lesson he draws is that the appetite and the talent are already there; what’s missing is direction, and direction is the debt his generation still owes.

The one thing he treats as non-negotiable is hope. Muzamil names the real enemy as despondency — a hopelessness that kills the very capacity to climb out, that has young people asking what the point of twelve hours of effort is and settling for four, dragging their own productivity down into a cycle they can’t escape. Go abroad for growth and exposure, he says, but never because you’re fleeing a country you’ve written off. Hafiz ur Rehman answers in his own register: hope first, then trust — not just in yourself but in the God who made you — and then dreams. You have to lay the foundation of a new dawn by first daring to see it. Asked how he reads Pakistan in 2050, he doesn’t hedge with conditions about government or reform. Decay runs to a point and then reverses. With sixteen, seventeen crore young people, if the right voices reach them, the country becomes a strong nation. Maybe not in his lifetime, he allows — but it gets there.