British Surgeon Reveals to UK Parliament Israeli Atrocities in Gaza

London, MINA – British surgeon who worked in Gaza for a month has testified to the British Parliament on the horrors he witnessed in the Strip, detailing accounts of Israeli snipers shooting civilians and drones picking off children after air strikes, Middle East Monitor reports.

During a session of the International Development Committee in Britain’s House of Commons on the humanitarian situation in Gaza, retired surgeon, Nizam Mamode who worked at Nasser Hospital from mid-August to mid-September stated that 60 to 70 per cent of those they treated in Gaza were women and children.

He and his team notably “saw a number of children with sniper injuries to the head, a single shot to the head. No other injuries. So clearly, they were deliberately targeted by Israeli snipers… that was day after day”.

Aside from the air strikes and bombings frequently carried out by Israeli forces on the besieged Strip, one thing that Mamode found “particularly disturbing” after the strike on “a crowded, tented area” was that the “drones would come down and pick off civilians, children”, he said as he attempted to control his emotions.

“We [were] operating on children who would say: ‘I was lying on the ground after a bomb had dropped and this quadcopter came down and hovered over me and shot me.’” Those were reportedly incidents that occurred not occasionally but “day after day after day”.

Mamode further explained that the bullets fired by the drones were “small cuboid pellets” and that he “fished a number of those out of the abdomen of small children. I think the youngest I operated on was a three-year-old.

He described those pellets as “way more destructive than [conventional] bullets” as he found that “they would go in and they would bounce around so they would cause multiple injuries.” One 7-year-old boy he operated on “had an injury to his liver, spleen, bowel, arteries, so quite extensive destruction from a single entry point.”

The surgeon noted that, with his long experience of working in a number of conflict zones all over the world, including that of the Rwandan genocide, “I’ve never seen anything on this [Gaza’s] scale, ever. I’ve never been in a conflict area where medical aid has been restricted to that extent … It’s not allowing supplies in, bombing health care facilities, attacking ambulances, killing health care workers.”

When asked whether he saw the events in Gaza as a genocide, Mamode said it is “difficult to find another word for it, given what we’ve seen. And I certainly think that the Palestinian people feel that’s what’s happening to them and there’s a sense of resignation that they’re all just waiting to die with no chance of escape. So, in a word, yes.” He also remarked that “It doesn’t matter who you are in Gaza. If you’re Palestinian, you’re a target.”

Following his testimony, the Committee’s Chair, Sarah Champion, said the examples Mamode gave were “profound and deeply chilling”, and that based on the evidence given, “the UK needs to take seriously the prospect of international humanitarian law having been egregiously broken in Gaza”.

She assured that the Committee “will do all we can to act on Professor Mamode’s extraordinary testimony and ensure that his experiences are heard loud and clear. If leaders are not yet listening, they should be by now. (T/RE1/P2)

Mi’raj News Agency (MINA)