Medical doctors from the US, UK and France shared their experiences in Gaza during a press conference at the United Nations on Tuesday (March 19).
Dr. Nick Maynard, a cancer surgeon from Oxford, who has worked and volunteered in Gaza over the last 15 years, said he was not remotely prepared for what he saw.
00:06 I spent two weeks at Al-Aqsa Hospital and I think it's fair to say I wasn't remotely prepared for what I saw.
00:14 I saw the most appalling atrocities and I saw things that I never would have expected to have seen in any health care setting.
00:27 This is Hiam Abu Khadr. She's seven years old.
00:31 She is one of the victims of the war in Gaza.
00:36 A bomb hit her family home, so her father and brother were killed and her mother also was injured and she had burned.
00:45 And she sustained third-degree burns on 40% of her body.
00:50 She was treated by one of our volunteers, Dr. Vanita Gupta, who is a critical care specialist from New York, in the European hospital in Deir el-Balah.
01:01 And Dr. Gupta took some videos of her and you can see her face in the videos and also in this picture.
01:07 And if you want to define post-traumatic stress disorder, this is what post-traumatic stress disorder looks like in the face of a child who's seven years old.
01:17 She was supposed to be evacuated to Egypt and she waited for weeks before she was eventually evacuated and she died two days after evacuation because it was too late.
01:29 You could put up a thousand field hospitals and they wouldn't address a tenth of the needs in Gaza today.
01:37 The hospitals that exist need to be rendered functional again.
01:41 The health system needs to be restored.
01:43 If there was anything to add to Gaza Strip, it would be post-operative beds.
01:48 Lots and lots and lots of beds, thousands, tens of thousands of beds, just to be able to house all the people with surgical needs and non-surgical needs.
01:56 Because while the hospitals themselves can function, you have to have a place to put patients while they're recovering.
02:02 I spent some time a while ago looking up the definition of genocide in a variety of dictionaries and what is going on in Gaza fulfils every single definition of genocide that I have read.
02:15 So there's no doubt in my mind that's what's going on and I think the end game, it appears to those of us who've been on the ground there,
02:21 and indeed more importantly is the views of all the Gazans I've spoken to, is that the end game of the Israeli government is to force them out completely from Gaza, to eradicate them from that land.
02:34 Our goal in the next three days is to get this message to the highest level because we understand, I think everyone understands,
02:42 that the only country that can influence the situation is the United States of America.
02:46 So by talking to the National Security Council staff and members of the Congress and the State Department,
02:53 we want to make sure that they know what we know and hopefully that will affect the decision-making process.
