In February, I approached Dr. Samer Attar, a surgeon in Chicago, as he prepared for a volunteer medical mission to Gaza. He is a war zone medic who previously volunteered to treat patients in Syria, Ukraine and Iraq. It would be his second trip to Gaza, and I wanted to propose a collaboration with Opinion Video. His trip, I thought, could offer our viewers access to hospitals largely cut off from international media and the world. I wondered what a collapsed medical system looked like on the ground and how more civilian lives could be saved. Attar said that his video experience was minimal. I asked him if he'd be willing to take a crash course from our Opinion Video team to learn how to document his experience — that is, when he wasn't busy performing lifesaving surgeries. He declined. He was uneasy about being a central character in a film that, he said, should feature only Gazan doctors and patients. But by the time he returned from that trip to Gaza, he'd had a change of heart. The war was so dire that it must be documented and must be seen, he told me. The war that people outside the territory were seeing was a largely sanitized version, he said, and he wanted to do whatever he could to show the world the reality he had experienced. Just before Attar's third mission to Gaza, in late March, Amanda Su, an Opinion Video producer, met him at his home in Chicago and gave him a video tutorial. The result: more than 10 hours of raw smartphone video from inside Gaza's ravaged hospitals. The footage is gruesome and difficult to watch. This war, Attar said, was the most brutal of all the conflicts he had witnessed. In the resulting video, co-produced and edited by Alexander Stockton, which we published today, Attar argues that there are three tangible terms of any meaningful cease-fire that would save thousands of civilian lives. They are medical in nature, not political, and they are nonnegotiable, he says. This film is not easy viewing — and this version shows only a small amount of the footage he recorded. This is the warzone Attar wants you to see. Watch the video here: Here's what we're focusing on today:
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Tuesday, May 21, 2024
Opinion Today: A wrenching look inside Gaza’s hospitals
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