OCTOBER 21 • 2021 | 35
A
Muslim doctor from
London has spoken
of his pride and joy at
helping separate Jewish Israeli
conjoined twins early this
month, saying it illustrates that
“from a doctor’s point of view,
we’re all one.
”
Staff at Soroka University
Medical Center in Beersheba
successfully completed the
operation on the twins con-
joined at the head, and said
that the babies are now likely to
grow up to live normal lives.
The medical team managed
this despite never having per-
formed such a surgery, which
involved complex on-the-spot
decisions regarding which
blood vessel to give to which
twin and assessing in real-time
the impact that immediate deci-
sions were having on the func-
tioning of the brains.
Now, the man who brought
the experience to the table has
told his story to the Times of
Israel — and said it should serve
as a reminder that medicine
transcends all divisions.
Dr. Noor Ul Owase Jeelani,
a pediatric neurosurgeon at
London’s Great Ormond Street
Hospital, has performed four
other separation surgeries on
twins who were conjoined at the
head with fused skulls, inter-
twined brains and shared blood
vessels.
He and his colleague,
Professor David Dunaway, are
seen as the world’s experts on
such cases.
Jeelani directs a nonprofit,
Gemini Untwined, to plan and
perform such operations. When
doctors at Soroka needed to
prepare for the operation, they
reached out to him. He agreed,
for the first time, to operate out-
side the U.K.
He said the fact that a
Kashmir-born Muslim doctor
scrubbed up alongside an Israeli
team to help a Jewish family
was a reminder of the universal
nature of medicine.
“It was a fantastic family that
we helped,
” he said. “
As as I’ve
said all my life, all children are
the same, whatever color or
religion. The distinctions are
manmade. A child is a child.
From a doctor’s point of view,
we’re all one.
”
He found the family’s delight
at the success of the operation
deeply moving.
“There was this very special
moment when the parents were
just over the moon,
” he said. “I
have never in my life seen a per-
son smile, cry, be happy and be
relieved at the same time. The
mother simply couldn’t believe
it; we had to pull up a chair to
help her to calm down.
”
Jeelani’s involvement with
conjoined twins started in 2017,
when a neurosurgeon from
Peshawar, Pakistan, asked him
to operate on identical con-
joined twins, Safa and Marwa,
born three months earlier to
a woman from rural northern
Pakistan.
He raised the money from
a Pakistani oil trader called
Murtaza Lakhani and, with
Dunaway, successfully per-
formed the operation, after
hundreds of hours of prepara-
tion. He went on to establish
Gemini Untwined and perform
more surgeries.
He worked for months on the
Israeli surgery.
“We’ve been involved right
from the start, talking to the
team in Israel and planning it
with them over a period of six
months,
” he said.
Jeelani added: “This latest
surgery fulfills a key objective of
our charity, namely, to empower
local teams abroad to undertake
this complex work, successfully
utilizing our experience, knowl-
edge and skills gained over the
past 15 years with our previous
four sets of twins.
”
Muslim doctor helps Israelis separate Jewish conjoined twins.
Medical Heroics
NATHAN JEFFAY TIMES OF ISRAEL
LEFT: Conjoined twins before they were separated at Soroka University Medical Center in Beersheba. RIGHT: The conjoined twins, newly sepa-
rated, look at each other for the first time on Sept. 5.
COURTESY SOROKA UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER
COURTESY SOROKA UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER
COURTESY NOOR UL OWASE JEELANI
Dr. Noor Ul Owase Jeelani
ERETZ