“Barbaric. Carnage. Catastrophic. All of these words don’t really capture the everyday experience of trying to survive through a genocide,” Dr. James Smith, who recently returned to the UK from Gaza, tells Zeteo contributor Fatima Bhutto in the latest episode of 'The Exchange.'
Smith, who has been to the enclave twice since the war began, most recently worked in Rafah and central Gaza for two months, including at the Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah and Al-Awada Hospital in the Nuseirat refugee camp. “It was carnage,” he says. They were “the most horrific scenes that I have ever seen as an emergency physician.”
Smith also accused Western media of not fully capturing and exposing the devastation caused by Israel’s assault.
“We talk about the media being complicit in Israel's violence… but they also, it would appear, actively obscured the reality of what's happening,” he says, pointing to coverage of Israel’s massacre of more than 270 Palestinians in Nuseirat that occurred just after he left Gaza. Local physicians he worked with described people lying in pools of their own blood in the hospital and patients crammed into an already overcrowded spaces. “The most horrific, unimaginable conditions. And I truly don’t think that any of the major media outlets have captured the barbarity of this violence.”
Watch the above video for more from this powerful and eye-opening conversation between Fatima and Dr. Smith.
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‘The Exchange’ is a series in which Zeteo contributors interview experts and newsmakers on the biggest stories of the week. Let us know in the comments who you’d like to see in ‘The Exchange’ next.
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