Dr James Smith:
I have never worked anywhere that was as violent, as frightening, and as unstable as Gaza was then, and as Gaza still is now. I returned again in April and ended up staying for nearly two months. That was an unscheduled two-month period, and I say unscheduled because during that period the Israeli occupation forces invaded the south of Gaza. At that time, of course, there was a lot of deliberation around the so-called red line, which was supposed to be avoiding an invasion of Rafah, the city into which tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, in fact, of Palestinians had fled from the north and the middle areas, and the Israeli military invaded that city and now completely occupied that city. We were unable to leave for close to two months because the border crossing between Egypt and Gaza was completely destroyed.
Reporter:
It’s hard to read this letter, as anyone listening to this would expect:
“With only marginal exceptions, everyone in Gaza is sick, injured, or both. This includes every national aid work or every international volunteer, and every man, woman, and child, virtually every child under the age of five we encountered. Both inside and outside the hospital had both a cough and watery diarrhea, jaundice, hepatitis A, widespread, in the hospitals where we worked, surgical complication right near 100%. All of us treated children who seemed to have been deliberately targeted by military violence, bullet wounds to children’s heads and torsos and amputations of limbs and eyes of children were commonplace.”
And it goes on. It goes on and on and on and on. That’s why the next question I ask you may seem an odd one, but how much good can you actually do in the face of such horrors?
Dr James Smith:
I think this is actually a really important question because the simple answer to that is that there is very little that you can do as a medical or humanitarian worker under such conditions.