Heal Palestine brings a special guest to Sarasota.
By Johannes Werner
Original Air Date: November 21, 2025
Host: There’s a ceasefire in Gaza, which is more or less holding, as step 1 in Trump’s 20-step peace plan. But the humanitarian disaster continues. A local activist is hosting a fundraiser Saturday for Heal Palestine, an NGO that brings a special guest to Sarasota. We have the details.
Yassin, seeing his first snowflakes. All photos courtesy HEAL Palestine
Yassin: Speaking in Arabic
Johannes Werner: This is Yassin, a 12-year old from Gaza, seeing the first snow of his life, recently sitting in the back of a car in the United States. Yassin lost his father during the bombing of his home more than a year ago. He then lost both his legs.
Steve Sosebee: There was a bombing of his home, which killed his father and other relatives, and he and his family escaped and went south to Rafah, which was then attacked and completely destroyed. Rafah basically doesn’t exist anymore on a map. And so they went back to their home, and he actually went back to his bombed home, looking for his books for school. He wanted to keep, you know, he had some school books that he wanted to get from the rubble. And when he went to that home, it was bombed again, and he lost both of his legs and was buried under rubble for several hours.
JW: That’s Steve Sosebee, founder of Heal Palestine, the non-profit that brought Yassin and 32 other children from Gaza to the United States, to get medical help. While here, Yassin will be visiting Tampa and Sarasota.
Yassin puts a face on statistics: Gaza now has the highest share of child amputees of any place in recorded history.
And Yassin will be in Sarasota because resident-activist Melissa Morsli is putting together a fundraiser for Heal Palestine this Saturday, 11:30 am at Michaels On East.
Sosebee
The Ohio-based organization is just two years old, but founder Sosebee has a history covering humanitarian needs of Palestinians going back 30 years ago to his college years. Heal Palestine had a presence on the ground in Gaza throughout the two years of war, and now it is expanding its activities. They range from opening community kitchens and a bakery, to providing thousands of tents for shelter and schooling, as well as field hospitals and a mental health program for traumatized children.
To give Sarasotans an impression of what air raids, drone attacks, tank and artillery warfare did to people in Gaza: Gaza is a slim strip of coastal land about one-sixth the size of Sarasota. But 2.1 million people are crammed into the tiny territory, almost three times as many people as in Sarasota. There was no place to run and hide for most civilians.
Steve Sosebee: There are no safe areas. If you compare it to other conflict areas like Ukraine, like Syria, Iraq, people in those places can eventually seek refuge across borders. They can eventually head in one direction, away from the fighting. As hard as it is for those people, I’m not minimizing the suffering that people in those conflicts have endured. However, in Gaza, there’s no place for them to go. The borders are closed. There’s no exit point, and there’s no safe areas, even if you even if they declare a certain area as a safe area, which they have called Al-Mawasi, an area of Khan Younis where we have our field hospital as a safe area, those places still get bombed.
There was no place to run or hide.
JW: Close to 70,000 people have died in Gaza during the two years of war. And people continue to die, because the territory continues to face humanitarian disaster.
Steve Sosebee: Palestinians have been forced into areas, living in tents without any infrastructure, into a very, very small area, and the impact that that has on the health services, on the education services, on the mental health of the entire population is unprecedented in modern history. Yassin is not in school because his schools were destroyed in Gaza. He hasn’t been in school for over two years as a 12-year old, you can imagine how that impacts a child’s development. No child in Gaza is in school. We’ve opened a few schools and provided education, but that’s far, far too limited to what the needs are for hundreds of thousands of children, just like Yassin.
JW: Asked what Floridians can do to help – beyond money – Sosebee had this to say.
No school for children in Gaza in two years.
Steve Sosebee: Unfortunately, our government has stopped issuing visas for injured children to come to the United States. That happened last August, and we would ask Americans to reach out to their representative and ask why that decision was taken. These are innocent children who are coming for free medical care. It’s not on the taxpayers dime. They’re not staying. We sponsor them to go back to Egypt and take care of them there. They’re coming only with their mothers or with some of their siblings if their fathers have been killed, we take care of everything for them. We don’t use any government resources. We’re not doing this on the taxpayer’s dime. So why was this program stopped? So if people wanted to help, reach out to their representative and say, ‘Please, you know, if you can help reverse this policy, that would be a great humanitarian contribution, and it’s in our best interest as Americans. It’s our values as Americans to heal these kids’.
JW: In the meantime, other countries such as Mexico and Canada are taking in children from Gaza.
SS: So we have to keep finding places we can send them. And if the United States is not one of those places, unfortunately, we have to go to places that will welcome them. And we’re finding a huge positive response from other countries.
JW: For information about tickets to the Heal Palestine fundraiser, this Saturday 11:30 am at Michael’s On East, call Melissa Morsli at 941-323-8669. Heal Palestine is a non-political, non-religious organization. Morsli expects a peaceful event.
Melissa Morsli
Melissa Morsli: I want it to be an opportunity for people in our community to come together. You know, there’s been a lot of very upsetting things happening in the world lately, and for the past two years, it’s been hard for people to find avenues to be helpers. And as Mr. Rogers said, when things are scary, you look for the helpers. This room will be filled with a lot of helpers on Saturday.
JW: This has been Johannes Werner, reporting for WSLR News.
For more information on Heal Palestine, click here: https://www.healpalestine.org/
WSLR News aims to keep the local community informed with our 1/2 hour local news show, quarterly newspaper and social media feeds. The local news broadcast airs on Wednesdays and Fridays at 6pm.