Hello and welcome to the LRB podcast. I'm your host, Adam Shatz, and joining me on this week's episode are two experts on Gaza, Dr.

Gassan Abu Sita, the rector of Glasgow University, who's in Beirut, and the journalist

Mohamed Shahada, whose work appears in a variety of venues, including Middle East Monitor

and Al Jazeera. Mohamed is joining us from Copenhagen.

This is the fourth in a series of podcasts reflecting on the impact of October 7,

the destruction of Gaza, and the war is unleashed in the wider region over the last 14 months.

Thank you, Gassan, and Mohammed, for joining me.

Thank you for inviting us.

Now, in much of the mainstream press, and especially the Western press, there's this persistent notion that the events of the last 14 months began on October 7 with Hamas's

Al-Axia flood attack.

But history didn't begin on that day. So I want to start by asking both

of you to talk about what life was like for ordinary Gazans on October 6. Gassan, could you

begin? So I had in the year and a half before the war, I had been running a training program for

plastic and reconstructive surgeons at Shifa Hospital. And I had spent July, the whole of July

operating in Shiffa Hospital, July 2023.

And I can tell you, when I left Gaza at the end of that month, I really felt that the

situation with unsustainable. The number of malnourished children that I was seeing and

therefore unable to operate on because of their, what we call

failure to thrive, their failure to grow, the sense of hopelessness that the Palestinian

question was being slowly liquidated with the creeping but accelerating annexation and ethnic cleansing

happening in the West Bank and the impending Saudi-Israeli peace agreement.

And so there was also no sense that there is a future.

...