With not a single empty seat in the crowd, hundreds gathered at Washington DC’s Georgetown University for a screening of Zeteo’s documentary, ‘Gaza: Doctors Under Attack,’ which the BBC refused to air. The screening of the documentary, produced by Basement Films, was followed by a panel discussion with Mehdi and California trauma surgeon Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, who recently came back from Gaza. The panel was moderated by the Director of the Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, Nader Hashemi.
“I wish it wasn't a Zeteo film,” Mehdi opened by saying of the documentary. “It was supposed to have aired on the BBC, and yet the BBC decided, under pressure from all sorts of institutions, individuals, groups, that they couldn't run this film.”
Dr. Sidhwa, who has been to Gaza twice since the genocide started and is planning for his third visit later this year, explained to the audience the realities of being a doctor in Gaza that our film couldn’t show. “You can only show so much in an hour,” said the trauma surgeon. “One thing it doesn't show is their struggle to survive.”
The doctor shared personal experiences from his trips to Gaza, including the killing of one of his child patients while he was being treated, the difficulty of getting into the occupied strip, and testimonies from Palestinian doctors who cannot leave.
“I fly in for two weeks, and I fly out, and I pat myself on the back, and then I go eat a big cheeseburger. But these folks are there literally just all the time. And there's countless stories of physicians working in the ER when their whole family is brought in dead,” Dr. Sidhwa recounts.
Audience members got to take part in the conversation by putting their own questions to the panel, which ranged from what they can do to fight Israel’s brutality, how Dr. Sidhwa prepares for his trips to Gaza, and where Israel’s red lines are drawn, among many others.
Mehdi, as ever, didn’t hold back in his scathing critique of both Israel’s genocidal government and our own complicit mainstream media!
Paid subscribers can watch the full discussion above. Free subscribers can watch a three-minute preview. Do consider becoming a paid subscriber to Zeteo and never hitting another paywall again!
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