DR SWEE ANG, the founder of Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP), is a self-described “tiny woman refugee from south-east Asia.”

Indeed, the first thing that struck me when we met recently at the Cafe in the Crypt in St Martin-in-the-Fields, is how diminutive she is. But Ang is a big believer in the power of small.

“There is no such thing as big things and small things. We do a lot of small things and together it counts,” she told a largely female audience at University College London during a December 2013 TEDx talk for UCLWomen. “We will make big differences by making many small differences.”

This is precisely what Ang, now 76 and still working as a consultant orthopaedic surgeon at Barts Hospital, has been doing for the past 40-plus years. And as you listen to what she has witnessed — and, more importantly, what she has done about the horrors she has seen — you can’t help but be reminded of Shakespeare’s Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “Though she be but little, she is fierce.”

That determination led Ang to become the first female consultant orthopaedic surgeon at Barts, despite efforts to dissuade her — “I was constantly told orthopaedics is a job for men. Consultants are all tall, public school, rugby players, so they’d say ‘can you please do something else’?”

Hers is a quiet ferocity, however, born of a personal transformation that took place almost by chance. Ang has twice found herself unexpectedly in the midst of a war crime and the first time it changed her life completely. That led to the creation of MAP, a British-based charity that, according to its website, works to ensure “a future where all Palestinians can access an effective, sustainable and locally led system of healthcare, and the full realisation of their rights to health and dignity.”

Most recently, MAP has been a beneficiary of musician Paul Weller’s Gigs for Gaza both last December and this October, which raised funds for MAP and Gaza Forever, UK, another group that works on the ground in Gaza helping the Palestinians there survive.

For the first four decades of her life, however, Ang knew nothing about the Palestinian people. Raised a Christian zionist in Singapore, Ang “bought into everything which Netanyahu and the American Christian right bought into,” she said. “I had no idea that Palestinians existed.”

But in 1982, that changed. Already an established orthopaedic surgeon in London where she had moved after her husband, Francis Khoo, was exiled from Singapore, Ang answered a call for help from Christian Aid to treat victims of the Israeli bombardment in Lebanon.

Largely apolitical, Ang had been watching the news “about somewhere called Lebanon and somewhere called Beirut.” To her shock, “I realised that the planes that were dropping the bombs were Israeli,” Ang said. “I had always supported Israel because I was totally familiar with what happened to Jews during the Holocaust.” Now, she found herself asking “How can they do this?”

To get some answers, she flew to Lebanon and began treating the wounded, mostly Palestinians crowded in refugee camps there. “The wounds were horrendous, not things that an ordinary working surgeon would ever ever see,” she said. “Children with two arms off, half a brain off.”

Then the ceasefire happened. “Because I was so soaked in misinformation, I actually believed the US peace plan was going to work,” she said, a naivety she has since shed completely.

Instead, between September 16 and 18, Lebanese Christian militias swept into the impoverished neighbourhood of Sabra, inhabited mostly by Palestinian refugees and Lebanese Shi’ites, and the adjoining Shatila Palestinian refugee camp. Aided and abetted by the Israel Defence Forces, they massacred as many as 3,500 people.

“What changed me completely from a zionist Christian into a Palestinian supporter was that massacre,” Ang said. The overseas medical teams were ordered to evacuate but Ang refused, staying behind to treat the wounded. “So I didn’t leave and so began a 43-year journey with the Palestinian people,” she said.

When she returned to Britain she founded MAP, initially to train doctors in Gaza and provide medical equipment. But since October 2023 when Israel’s current genocide in Gaza began, MAP has also been sending in foreign doctors to help the overwhelmed medical staff there under perpetual siege in their largely destroyed hospitals. “We have asked our doctors to bear witness to what they have seen,” Ang said.

One who has been particularly outspoken is MAP chair, Dr Nick Maynard, a consultant gastrointestinal surgeon at Oxford University Hospital. Maynard has been traveling to Gaza for the past 15 years and was there in July 2025 helping at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis when he noticed that the IDF was shooting at young boys coming to the aid distribution sites. Worse, the snipers were targeting different body parts on different days, something Maynard called “beyond coincidence.”

In an interview with National Public Radio in the US, Maynard described how “we’re seeing a particular pattern of injuries whereby particular body parts are being targeted on particular days. So one day we will see mainly abdominal gunshot wounds. Another day we’ll see head gunshot wounds. Another day we’ll see neck gunshot wounds.”

Ang understands all too well the horrors that her medical colleagues who travelled to Gaza have been witnessing. She, too, attempted a trip there in November 2023, but, still in recovery from cancer, she quickly realised the journey on foot from Egypt would be too hard for her and reluctantly came home.

Less than a year later, she found herself once again caught up in the atrocities of yet another Israeli war crime. Ang was making her annual September journey back to Sabra Shatila for the anniversary of the massacre there, where she marks the commemoration and visits with survivors and their families. Her 2019 book, From Beirut to Jerusalem, describes that personal journey.

As Ang stepped off the plane, she was met by a friend who drove her straight to the hospital. While Ang was still in flight, Israel had launched an attack directed at Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon, detonating pagers and walkie-talkies that maimed 4,000 and killed at least 40 people.

“The pager attack was a crime against humanity,” said Ang. At the hospital, “I started operating and operating and operating on the severely injured ones.” She found the scenes devastating. “These are all young people,” she recalled. “Who are the people who carry pagers? Think about it. Firefighters, ambulance drivers, security people, hospital doctors, nurses. These are all useful and important members of society. They perform healing, life-saving functions.”

On her last evening, feeling distressed but making her usual rounds to check on her patients, Ang was called to the bedside of a young man who had lost an eye and had a severely mutilated hand. As Ang began reassuring him that he would continue to receive excellent care, he interrupted her. “How are you feeling?” he asked her.

“Can you imagine?” Ang exclaimed. “I said I am very angry and very sad, very, very sad that this horrible crime has happened to all of you. And then I can even hear his voice,” she said. “‘Please do not feel sad, doctor,’ he told me. ‘We support justice. No matter what happened to us, we stand in solidarity with Gaza. If this is the price I’ve got to pay, I’ll pay’.”

Once again, Ang was witness to the extraordinary resilience and optimism she has consistently encountered among the Palestinian people. “That summarises who they are,” she said. “So when you ask me what hope there is, this is hope. In the midst of such a heinous crime, they cannot break them.”

Ang’s experiences have left her “obsessed with telling the Palestinian story,” as she described it in her TED talk. That and her work with MAP are what she calls her “night job,” with a full-time schedule at Barts during the day.

Returning to her theme of small acts of kindness, Ang says: “Every morning I get up [and say] let me help just one person, whether it’s a patient, whether it’s a beggar down the road, or just to bring a smile to someone’s face. That’s good enough for me.”

Linda Pentz Gunter is a writer based in Takoma Park, Maryland.