Professor Nizam Mamode, a retired NHS transplant surgeon, broke down while giving evidence to MPs about how Israel deliberately targets children in Gaza with drones.
Speaking to the parliamentary International Development Committee about his experiences at Gaza’s Nasser Hospital, Mamode revealed that Israeli quadcopters shot children who were already lying injured from bombings.
During his volunteer work with Medical Aid for Palestinians from mid-August to mid-September, he found that 60-70% of patients treated were women and children.
“It doesn’t matter who you are in Gaza. If you’re Palestinian, you’re a target,” Mamode told the committee.
Watch the full testimony
Some of the key quotes from the surgeon’s harrowing testimony
“The landscape reminded me of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: devastation and buildings reduced to rubble for miles around, as far as you could see. Nothing growing, no people, a few looters here and there—nothing. You drive through that for about 20 minutes, and then you get to the central part of southern Gaza, which was designated the green zone—I cannot bring myself to call it the safe zone or humanitarian zone, because it was neither. That green zone houses about 1.3 million people.”
“A large part of it comprises tents. When I say tents, some of those are proper tents, but many of them are just pieces of carpet and plastic stuck on to sticks. These are in the middle of the road, at the side of the road, in every possible space. There is no running water, no sanitation, and no electricity, obviously. People are having to roll those tents up and move on at very, very short notice time and time again. Most people have moved six or seven times.”
“What I found particularly disturbing was that a bomb would drop, maybe on a crowded, tented area, then the drones would come down and….The drones would come down and pick off civilians—children. We had description after description. This is not an occasional thing. This was day after day after day of 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.” That is clearly a deliberate and persistent act; there was persistent targeting of civilians day after day. We had one or two mass casualty incidents every day, which meant 10 to 20 dead and 20 to 40 seriously injured. A hospital like Guy’s and St Thomas’, where I used to work, might get one or two a year. We had one or two a day, and 60% to 70% of the people we treated were women and children.
“The bullets that the drones fire are these small cuboid pellets. I fished a number of those out of the abdomens of small children. I think the youngest I operated on was a three-year-old who had a major injury to the artery in her neck….She died about three or four days later from an infection.”
“My personal experience and that of my colleagues was that this was clearly persistent, deliberate targeting of civilians. I have worked in a number of conflict zones in different parts of the world—I was there at the time of the Rwandan genocide—and I have never seen anything on this scale, ever. That was also the view of all the experienced colleagues I worked with. One of the surgeons in my team had been to Ukraine five times and said, “This is 10 times worse.””
“I remember, one Saturday night, operating on an eight-year-old who was bleeding to death. I asked for a swab and they said, “No more swabs.” We had operations being done with no sterile gloves or no sterile drapes at various points. We had a lack of basic equipment. I did amputations on people who just had to take paracetamol after the operation as pain relief….That medical aid was sitting at the border and not being allowed in…That is a deliberate policy. That has changed, because I know that teams earlier in the year had been able to take some medical equipment in.”
‘Egregious’ breaches of humanitarian law in Gaza
Responding to evidence from Professor Mamode, Committee Chair Sarah Champion said:“The examples Professor Mamode gave us today were profound and deeply chilling. On this evidence, the UK needs to take seriously the prospect of international humanitarian law having been egregiously broken in Gaza.
“The supposedly safe area in which he worked was neither a ‘safe’ nor a ‘humanitarian’ zone, he said, with more than one million people crammed into an increasingly small area. He recalled operating on patients without access at times to basic medical supplies like swabs or sterile gloves.
“Professor Mamode told us that he has worked in a number of dangerous conflict zones, including the Rwandan genocide. Yet still he had never seen anything on the scale of what he saw in Gaza. This view was no outlier; it was also that of his experienced colleagues, one of whom had travelled to Ukraine several times.
“He saw children with sniper injuries to the head, children shot by drones – evidence, he said, of targeting by the Israeli military. He told the Committee he was aware of five armoured UN convoys, used to travel into and out of Gaza, shot at by Israeli forces.
“But the conflict’s devastating direct impact on the population is just the tip of the iceberg. Professor Mamode informed us that many of the ancillary services that existed before the war – very good hospitals, staffed by very good medics – have been destroyed.
“The Committee will do all we can to act on Professor Mamode’s extraordinary testimony and ensure his experiences are heard loud and clear. If leaders are not yet listening, they should be by now.”
