Member of Parliament (MP): I would like to start this, the very first session of the International Development select committee. It is a new committee that we’ve got here for the new Parliament, and it is my great honor that our very first whiteness is Professor Nazim Mamode, who is a professor of transplant surgery. Nazim, you are here in front of us because you have recently returned from Gaza where you were doing some work in the hospitals over there. We really appreciate you coming and speaking with us today. It’s very difficult to get firsthand testimony obviously about what’s going on in Gaza at the moment. So, thank you for coming and sharing your experiences. I wonder if you could sort of properly introduce yourself and what you were actually doing out there and when you came back.
Professor Nazim Mamode: I’m no longer a professor of transport surgery. I retired from the NHS a couple of years ago. I’ve spent my time doing work overseas. I had a month in Gaza, mid-August to mid-September, working in Nassar Hospital with Medical Aid for Palestinians. I’m happy to tell you about my experiences there.
MP: Please, tell us when did you go? Why did you go?
Professor Nazim Mamode: Why did I go? Because I thought I had the skillset that could help. I did, when I was sitting in the convoy going in across the border, I did think, I have second thoughts, but it was too late then to get out of the convoy. And I think when we crossed the border, the first thing was really a complete sense of shock.
MP: What did you see? What did you smell?
Professor Nazim Mamode: You see a landscape that looks as though, it reminded me of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; devastation, buildings were reduced to rubble for miles around, as far one can see. Nothing growing. No people. A few looters here and there, but nothing. You drive through that for about 20 minutes. And then you get to the central part of southern Gaza, which was the designated as the Green Zone. I can’t bring myself to call it the Green Zone or the Humanitarian Zone because it was neither. That Green Zone houses about 1.3 million people.
MP: What sort of area is that?
Professor Nazim Mamode: It’s probably about the size of the city of London. You can walk across it fairly easily, if it was safe to do so. And a large part of it comprised of tents. And, when I say tents, some of those are proper tents. Many of them are just pieces of carpet and plastic stuck onto sticks. And these are in the middle of the road, side of the road, every possible space. There’s no running water, no sanitation, no electricity obviously. And people are having to roll those up and move on at very, very short notice. Time and time again, most people have moved six or seven times.
MP: What does it sound like, smell?
Professor Nazim Mamode: Well, the sound is mainly of two things. One is the drones. So, there are constant drones. The drones existed before October last year. It’s been a feature of Palestinian life for some time. But now the drones inspire fear, I think. And they inspired fear in me. And when I used to debate about sleeping outside on the stairs or inside in this very crowded hot room, part of that situation was whether the drones had the ability to pick me off when I was on the stairs.
MP: Identify you?
Professor Nazim Mamode: No, shoot me. So that’s what they do. Those drones are surveillance drones, but they are also drones that shoot people regularly. And I can tell you more about some of the people I’ve operated on who experienced that. So, you have this constant whine, which is very psychologically, very affecting because it represents danger and it’s constantly there. And the other sound that you hear are bombs, which were going off every hour or two throughout the month that I was there. And we spent the whole month in the hospital. We deemed it not safe to travel. And we were aware that there was a curfew, so we wanted to be in the hospital if casualties arrived at night. We did have a guesthouse. We didn’t want to stay there partly because of the travel, but also because one of the MAP guesthouses had been bombed in January of this year. So, we stayed in the hospital and a missile strike, or an artillery shell, would explode in the vicinity and the whole building would shake. Windows would rattle. You know, you would look out the window and run outside to see how close it was. It was a constant feature of life. We felt we were relatively safe because we thought unlikely there would be a direct strike on the hospital, but for those 1.3-1.4 million people, in that green zone, they were constantly being bombed day and night. And, and what I think I found particularly disturbing was that a bomb would drop maybe on a crowded tented area and then the drones would come down and… (chokes with tears)
MP: You take your time. We’re incredibly grateful that you’re making the time to be here today. And I can only imagine just how it has impacted you and will continue to impact you. And I feel because you can’t unsee what you’ve seen. But being able to share that with us really helps us hold legislators particularly to account. So we do appreciate the time that you’re making for us today. Thank you.
Professor Nazim Mamode: So the drones would come down and pick off civilians, children. And we had description after description. This is not an occasional thing. This was day after day after day, 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. And that’s clearly a deliberate act. And it was a persistent act, persistent targeting of civilians day after day. We had one or two mass casualty incidents every day. And that meant 10 to 20 dead, 20 to 40 seriously injured. Now a hospital like Guy’s where I used to work, Guy’s and St. Thomas might get one or two a year. We had one or two a day. And 60 to 70% of the people were treated were women and children.
MP: I’m sorry to do this. Draw you a little. You say children. I wonder if you could tell us sort of the ages of the children. And you say that they said that they were lying on the ground from a bomb shock. Do you believe them?
Professor Nazim Mamode: Oh yeah. Absolutely. I mean, a seven-year-old’s not going to make up a story.
MP: You’re talking little children, not late teens?
Professor Nazim Mamode: Well, the majority of the children who were casualties were young children, but we had casualties in their teens. We had women in their 30s. And it was a very consistent story. And the story would be given as soon as they came into the emergency department. So I’m absolutely no reason to doubt this. And the bullets that the drones fire are these small cuboid pellets. And I fished a number of those out of the abdomen 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. And we used the last shunt, which is a device you used to bypass the artery in the neck, to keep supplying blood to the brain. We used the last one in the hospital because those kinds of things are just not available. She died about three, four days later from infection.
PM: You believe it was deliberate targeting?
Professor Nazim Mamode: Absolutely. Absolutely, and there’s no question in my mind. And it’s been the experience of so many healthcare workers who’ve documented it time and time and time again. But my personal experience and those of my colleagues was, it was clearly persistent, deliberate targeting of civilians. And I’ve worked in a number of conflict zones in different parts of the world. I was there at the time of the Rwandan genocide. I’ve never seen anything on this scale, ever. And that was also the view of all the experienced colleagues that I worked with. One of the surgeons in my team had been to Ukraine five times and said, this is ten times worse. Normally in a conflict zone, you would have a front line to have fighting going on between two sets of forces. And you might get some civilians injured in that exchange. There doesn’t seem to be a front line. There just seems to be 1.4 million people trapped. They can’t leave. And having bombs dropped on them on a daily basis. And then drones coming in and shooting them. And there’s plenty of evidence out there from Israeli soldiers that that’s what’s going on. But we saw it. We saw the results of it.
MP: Thank you. Laura.
MP: You talked about a child dying of an infection that was caught. We know that supplies getting in are extremely limited, and less now than they have been in the past. Can you talk a bit about the challenges that you face because of the lack of supplies? How does that manifest itself when you’re trying to do your medical work?
Professor Nazim Mamode: Yeah. I mean, the… So, I remember one Saturday night operating on an eight-year-old who was bleeding to death and I asked for a swab. And they said, no more swabs. We had operations being done with no sterile gloves, no sterile drapes, at various points. We had 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. We were not allowed to take any medical equipment except for personal use. So, I was asked, could I bring thyroid medication for some people? I couldn’t take it in. That’s a deliberate policy. And that’s changed because I know that teams earlier in the year had been able to take some medical equipment in. So again, that seems to me to be a deliberate restriction of medical supplies. And basic things like soap, shampoo, that’s not being allowed in. I saw, I don’t know how many wounds with maggots in. One of my colleagues took maggots out of a child’s throat and intensive care. There were flies in the operating theatre landing in the wounds. It was appalling. And that’s a deliberate choice. It’s not an accident.
MP: In light of these challenges, how did you attempt to manage sterilization, infection?
Professor Nazim Mamode: You just do the best you can, but you know a large number of our patients, perhaps the majority, I don’t know, would survive the operation and die of infections afterwards. And I think there was another, there was a doctor in his 30s who worked in intensive care in the hospital. He got Hepatitis A, which is a disease of poor hygiene. It’s a disease for which there is a vaccination. I’ve been vaccinated. He didn’t have access to the vaccine. He became unwell. He became a patient in the ITU. He didn’t have the treatment that he could have had in a proper environment. And he died in his own ITU. We asked for him to be evacuated, but he wasn’t.
MP: Thank you. It sounds medieval, what you’re describing.
Professor Nazim Mamode: Yes, undoubtedly. I mean, and remember that Nassar hospital, at the time that I was there, was probably the best hospital in Gaza. Most other hospitals did not have the facilities and the equipment that Nassar had. And Nassar was barely functioning as a hospital. And was being run by staff, many of whom had very, very little experience because so many medical staff have been detained, been killed, some have left when they were able to leave. So, the intensive care, for example, was run basically by general practitioners who’d had very minimal training. So, the cost in life and suffering from that side of things is very substantial, because you don’t have the equipment, you don’t have the staff, you don’t have the facilities. And even getting access to the hospital, an ambulance was shot while I was there, several bullet holes in the windshield while it was going to pick up casualties. I think it’s something like 163 or more documented examples of ambulances being targeted. So many people never got an ambulance. People would carry casualties in, sometimes bring them in, and bring them in on donkey carts. And when a mass casualty happened, we’d have the whole emergency department. For people would be lying on the floor in pools of blood. And it would be a case of trying to decide who was alive, who was alive and might survive with some treatment, and who could wait a bit. And that was pretty much every day. And that’s been going on for a very long time now.
MP: Sorry, the information you’re giving is throwing us, but we’re glad that you’re giving it to us. Alice.
MP: Thank you. It’s very powerful testimony. You mentioned at the beginning that about 60%, I think, of the people you were saying were women and children. Can you just expand a little bit more on the kind of effects that you were seeing on women and children. Presumably, you know, there would be pregnant women coming in, for example. Just to talk about some of the challenges that you were seeing particularly when it comes to those two groups of vulnerable people?
Professor Nazim Mamode: Yeah, I mean, I wouldn’t want to be pregnant in Gaza at the moment. We didn’t deal directly with women giving birth. That was dealt with elsewhere, so I didn’t have experience of that. But you would have people with blast injuries, abdominal injuries, chest injuries, limbs blown off. Head injuries. We saw a number of children with sniper injuries to the head, single shot to the head. No other injuries. So clearly deliberately targeted by Israeli snipers. And yeah, that was day after day.
MP: Maybe just ask a follow-up question in terms of, you know, the horrendous things you’re describing, you know, drone targeting, snipers, as you just mentioned. And how was that kind of, in terms of what you were seeing happening? How was that kind of, because there was a way to kind of bring some of that together in the same way that you’re sharing this evidence with us here now? Or was that shared back on the ground in different ways with different people?
Professor Nazim Mamode: Do you mean with people in Gaza?
MP: Yeah, how’s it documented, if it’s possible to do that?
Professor Nazim Mamode: It’s not really, I mean, the emergency department is chaos most of the time. There’s no, I mean, there are no medical notes anymore. You know, there’ll be little scraps of literally little scraps of paper. People would write something on saying, you know, ‘had an amputation come back in a week on discharge’. That was the extent. And there were, I think they documented the admissions, but collecting details statistics about causes of a particular trauma is difficult. I think, I’m sorry, just to say one other thing, I mean, I think as you probably know, there’s been a letter from 32 doctors and nurses from the UK who wrote to the Prime Minister back in September, who had worked in Gaza, some of them overlapped with me. And 99 in the US who wrote to Biden in October, saying exactly the same things. This is not a surprise. This is something that senior politicians I’m sure are well aware of.
MP: Just an additional question. What was the balance that you were seeing between people whose injuries and suffering was caused directly by the conflict, e.g. bullets, bombs, shrapnel, and so on, versus disease, hunger and other types of illness affected by living in those conditions? Professor Nazim Mamode: Yeah, there were a lot of people with those problems. As a surgeon, I only kind of saw them peripherally coming through. So, we would on a daily basis, there would be several people coming to the emergency department, for example, with diabetic ketoacidosis. So, these would be diabetics who didn’t have access to insulin and then they would develop a diabetic coma. So that’s, you have to go back to the 30s and 40s in this country for that to happen. Insulin needs to be kept in a fridge. If you’re living in a tent, how do you store it? How do you even get hold of it? So, there were lots of those examples. Colleagues who were working in primary care were describing huge amounts of infectious disease, particularly amongst children. We certainly saw malnourished children and I think that’s just getting worse and worse and worse now. And then of course there were all the other normal conditions if you like. So, we came across people with bowel cancer, and they got an operation, but it wasn’t a curative operation because there’s no chemotherapy, no radiotherapy. So, all the kind of ancillary services that existed before, they had some very good hospitals with very good facilities and very good staff, they were all gone. They’ve been destroyed. So there’s a huge, uncounted cost to the war and there was a paper in the Lancet in July, estimating because of that, both the casualties that have been counted, those that were likely to be under the rubble, and all of those who were dying from other diseases as a result of the war, they estimated conservatively 186,000 dead. That was in those figures up to June. So, to my mind it’s over 200,000 now.
MP: You talked about colleagues who had been detained and killed.
Professor Nazim Mamode: Yes.
MP: Can you give an idea of how many colleagues you were working amongst in the hospital?
Professor Nazim Mamode: The colleagues I was working with.
MP: Yes
Professor Nazim Mamode: Do you mean Palestinian colleagues?
MP: Yes, locally.
Professor Nazim Mamode: Well there were quite a few. I would have to guess, probably about 20, 25 doctors in the hospital. Maybe more I don’t know. But there were many, many more, before the war and many of the doctors I was working with had been in the north and then fled the north and were now making up the numbers in the south.
MP: You also talked about ambulances being targeted. Did you feel safe?
Professor Nazim Mamode: Well, I felt relatively safe in the sense that I thought it was unlikely that they’d drop a 2000 bomb directly on the hospital. But we were worried about drones. We couldn’t leave the hospital and traveling in and out was probably the most nerve-wracking thing. So we traveled in and out on a UN convoy, in armored vehicles that’s been shot at five times by the Israelis. And these convoys that are very carefully organized. So, they follow a pre-determined route given to them by the Israeli Army. There’s a radio check at the start before they leave, during the journey, and at the end. So the Israeli army knows that they’re there and where they are and despite that five times, including while we were there, they’ve been shot at. So, my biggest fear while I was there was being killed by the Israelis.
MP: The convoy that was shot at, was this sort of a rogue sniper or was this..?
Professor Nazim Mamode: No, no, this is the Israeli army coming up as a unit and delivery shooting and,
MP: UN Convoy?
Professor Nazim Mamode: Yes, yes. So, the last one that when I was there, I think it would have been about the end of August. It was reported. Some WHO staff and these are armed vehicles. So you can see, I think four, five bullet marks in the window just where someone would have been sitting. We were told, given very clear instructions, the doors are going to be locked when you set off. Do not unlock the doors if the Israeli Army shoot at you, if they order you out, do not get out of the vehicle. You know this is a UN convoy. It’s got UN in big letters on the side, and it carries in twice a week, it carries about 30 to 40 aid workers from different organizations in and out. It’s you know, a huge number of aid workers have been targeted, and that’s, well, and again to my mind that’s a deliberate.
MP: Can I ask a question, sorry, The drone thing, especially when they’re shooting at people. These are single shots or are they machine guns? I mean are they targeting individual people with one off shot or how does it happen?
Professor Nazim Mamode: Yeah so luckily I never was anywhere near drone firing, so I can only comment on what we saw when people came in. So, we would see people with sometimes a single entry point sometimes two or three. What we did see on one or two occasions was a very disturbing pattern where there’d be three or four shots here (points to left upper chest), three or four shots here (points to right upper chest) and again in the groin. And that we all thought was prima facie evidence of an autonomous drone or semi-autonomous drone because a human operator would not be able to fire with that degree of accuracy that quickly, and there is some documentation that those were going to be used as reported in H’Aretz back in April. So that was particularly disturbing. But most of the drone injuries we saw were one, two, sometimes three shots, and these pallets were in a way more destructive than bullets because if you’re shot in the chest with a bullet, if it misses your heart, goes on the other side, it can go through your lung and out the back, you’ll probably survive. But with the drone pallets what I found was they would go in and they would bounce around, so they would cause multiple injuries. So, I had a seven-year-old boy, the one I described earlier, who gave a very clear description. He had an entry point here, he came in with stomach hanging out of his chest, he had an injury to his liver, spleen, bowel, arteries, so quite extensive destruction from a single-entry point, and he survived that and went out a week later. Whether he’s still alive, I don’t know.
MP: Thank you very much Nazim for coming in front of the committee. It’s incredibly valuable to hear your testimony, and I have to say that, you know, the four months have been an MP, I don’t think I’ve heard anything as harrowing as what you’re describing, so I really appreciate you coming in front of us. I wondered, and I realized this is a difficult question to answer, if you could try and give an estimation of how many lives could be saved, protected, by aid that is currently sitting at the border crossing. You know, what is the, what is the difference on the ground you feel that can be made with aid that is literally being taken away from you.
Professor Nazim Mamode: Can make a huge difference, a huge difference. I mean I’ve never been in a conflict area where, where medical aid has been restricted to that extent. I mean you know it’s not allowing supplies in, bombing healthcare facilities, attacking ambulances, killing healthcare workers, if all of that didn’t happen, then tens of thousands of lives would be saved, and I would, I would think that any army that is engaged in a war has a responsibility to the civilian population on both sides, and I’m seeing the opposite there.
MP: I could ask a follow-up question on that. From your experience and your colleagues experience working in other conflict zones, I mean, how different is this to, you know you give even the example of Ukraine, and how different this from a normal conflict zone, in terms of the medical
Professor Nazim Mamode: Completely, completely different in every respect. And you know, I think, that was a recurring theme from everybody, from people working for the UN, WHO, doctors everybody, the International Committee of the Red Cross were there with a field hospital. Most of the time in a conflict, a civilian population can move, they can get away from it, they may have to walk a long distance, they may have to suffer doing that, but you know, it’s the equivalent of just putting a blockade around the city of London saying you can’t leave and then dropping bombs month after month, and then closing down all the healthcare facilities. That’s what’s happening and it’s astonishing that it’s continuing. I mean we all found, found that it was beyond belief that this could continue,
MP: You regard what you saw as genocide?
Professor Nazim Mamode: I’m not an international human rights lawyer so I can’t talk about the absolute definitions, but it’s difficult to find another word for it, given what we’ve seen, and, and I certainly think that the Palestinian people feel that 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.
MP: The Israelis would say that they’re dropping leaflets warning people to move to different areas, so it’s not targeted at civilians. What are your thoughts on that?
Professor Nazim Mamode: Well, I think there’s two things. First of all, the green zone supposedly they’re not targeting, so most of our casualties were from the green zone and many of them had no evacuation, no warning at all, just a bomb would just drop. And we had a vehicle blown up five meters from the emergency department in the main street, we certainly didn’t get any warning, and if I’d been crossing the road to buy something that would have been the end of me. In terms of evacuation orders, the way it works is they normally send a message out on mobile phones to all the mobile phones, saying area number, whatever the evacuation order, so if you have a mobile phone and if it’s charged and working, which is not that easy if you’re in a tent, then you might have a chance. But the bombing typically would start sometimes minutes sometimes hours, so I had one of the Palestinian doctors who worked very closely with me, we were on a ward round one morning, and he suddenly looked at his phone and said, I’ve got to go, and he ran out the hospital, ran to find his tent where his wife, his two young children, the youngest was one and a half and his father were living, and they had to pack up the tent and walk for miles to find somewhere else, all the while thinking at any moment we may have a bomb dropped on us. And that’s the day-to-day reality of life for all those people.
MP: You talked about this day-to-day reality, you’ve talked about children being targeted, and healthcare workers being killed, and you talked about a sense of resignation that, you know, civilians think they will die. Can you give us a sense of what they think about the international community, or do they think at all about what we could do?
Professor Nazim Mamode: Well they were very pleased to hear that I’ve spoken with some MPs last week. When I messaged the colleagues there and said this is what I’m doing. And I said, I don’t know if it’ll make much difference. And they said, small steps. I think they feel abandoned by the international community. They feel, some of them still hope that something might happen, and I think they appreciated hugely the fact that people were coming to help them and stand by them. That was one of the main reasons for going
MP: Nazim, thank you for coming and speaking to us today, and thank you having the strength to share your experiences as well. I know how difficult it must be. Going back to the points around targeting. Was there a threat that the Israeli Defense Force was seeing, was Hamas in the community, could you see where it was?
Professor Nazim Mamode: Yeah, I’m laughing because this was the question I asked when I got there, you know, is Hamas in the hospital, have they been in the hospital? And they just laughed at me, and they said there is no Hamas. There’s a few fighters hiding in tunnels, there’s no Hamas, there never was any Hamas in the hospital, everybody hates Hamas. And you know, we never saw any evidence in the street, in the hospital. You know, as I said I’ve been in conflict zones before, normally if fighters come in, they come in with guns, they come in with their friends with guns, we never saw any of that, we were allowed to go wherever we wanted in the hospital. You know, there might have been a tunnel underneath, who knows, but if Hamas were coming and going in the hospital, it would have been fairly evident, and I think they would have been probably kicked out by the people that worked there. I remember they described, with ironic laughter, they described one of their colleagues when Nassar hospital was attacked by the Israelis in February, and they killed a number of staff, put them in a mass grave along with a number of patients. That’s well documented. But they described one of their colleagues who was taken away and detained along with a number of others, who was killed in detention, and they said, well he was an atheist and he hated Hamas, and he was before the war, he was very vociferous about those things. He just thought Islam was stupid and he thought Hamas was stupid, and they took him away and killed him. That’s what’s going on, it’s, it’s not as far as I can see, it doesn’t matter who you are. In Gaza if you’re Palestinian, you’re a target.
MP: David and then Noah
MP: Thank you, Professor. It follows on from what Laura was asking you and what Gordon was asking you on the subject of medical supplies, what would you say in the circumstances, are there the highest needs, the highest priority in terms of the particular types of medical supplies that need to get in at this point?
Professor Nazim Mamode: Well basic medical supplies. So adequate things like swabs, gowns gloves, antibiotics, painkillers, all those basic things. Those are absolutely essential, but beyond that you need all of the other ancillary things. You need catheters to put into people, you need specialist imaging techniques, and so on. I’ve been a transplants surgeon for most of my career, so I know quite a bit about dialysis. I used to look every morning on the balcony, where our accommodation was in the hospital, I would look across to a building which had been the new dialysis center built by the Kuwaitis, as I understand it, and you can see that building is 100 meters away, burnt out, no shell damage, no bullet holes, there was no fight for, no fire fight there. The Israelis went in and burnt it out, so then now they have six or seven dialysis machines essentially for the whole of southern Gaza, and if you have kidney failure, and you don’t have dialysis, you die. So to my mind that, that you know, that’s just not acceptable.
MP: Thank you for sharing, these are really harrowing experiences. Do you have a sense on the point of being targeted as medical professionals, and you spoke about the information that the, you know, the defense forces have, I mean what, what in your mind, did you ever get a sense of any of the motivation behind some of these attacks, or is that very far away and distant for you?
Professor Nazim Mamode: Well, in terms of targeting foreign aid workers, so for example bombing of the MAP guesthouse in January, one of the surgeons he was with me, was there at the time and a missile landed just within the grounds in front of the house at six a.m. in the morning. Some people were injured, luckily nobody was killed. All of those guesthouses are in the Israeli army’s computers, they are designated as ‘safe houses’, so my assumption is that it is a deliberate attack, and that the aim behind it is to discourage aid workers from coming, and I think it’s the same as the shooting at the UN convoys. In terms of attacking hospitals and ambulances and so on, to my mind it can’t, it can’t be anything other than collective punishment. It’s just, it’s just a consistent attempt to essentially wipe out a large part of the population, and I think the other thing that comes through again and again when you talk to people, is the humiliation, the aggression. So, I was operating on one young girl one night who died not long afterwards, and I can’t even begin to describe her injuries. But when I’d finished operating on her, an ophthalmologist was trying to take out her left eye which was just pulp, and he was a lovely gentle man, maybe five years older than I, and he said, while he was working, he was just saying ‘yeah when they came in February they got all of us who were still here, they put our hands behind our backs, tied them up, put a hood over our heads, made a stand for 10 hours, beat us, cursed us in Arabic humiliated, humiliated, us, and then some were taken away, some were killed ,some were detained, some were released. We had a medical student , she worked with us, who described how the women had all been lined up and been told to strip down to their underwear, and made to stand for hours like that, which is deeply, deeply humiliating, particularly in that culture, and then when they told her she could go, they wouldn’t give her the clothes back. So she had to run through the streets like that, which for her was extremely traumatic. So there’s a consistent theme of attack, humiliation, aggression against people who are simply trying to do their job to try and help people in the worst possible circumstances.
MP: You said they did this to the medics, who
Professor Nazim Mamode: Israeli army, yeah.
MP: Laura, last question.
MP: You were in Nassar hospital, I think, The situation in north Gaza is getting a lot of attention now, more attention now for how awful it is. Did you have any contact with medical professionals trying to work in the north of the country?
Professor Nazim Mamode: No, only in the sense that I think there were three, there was a group of Jordanian doctors sharing the accommodation with us, and three of them said, we’re going to try and get into the north. And they got turned back at the essentially a border now, and weren’t allowed in. That was in August, when things were nothing like they are now.
MP: Very last question. Just in terms of going back to children and the effects on children. In terms of medical evacuations of children – in other conflicts you have seen that, in terms of children being able to be sent elsewhere for treatment, did you, was that something that you were advocating for in the hospital you’re working, or did you see it happen, and if it didn’t, do you think that is something that could be pushed further?
Professor Nazim Mamode: I don’t think it’s a solution. So, there is a tiny number of people who get evacuated for medical care. If you were to do it, in terms of need, it would be thousands going every month, literally. Because what was not picked up by a lot of the statistics is children who’ve had both legs blown off. And you know, you’ve got ongoing problems as a result. When I left, the WHO was trying to construct a tented area within the hospital grounds just to deal with constructing prosthetic limbs for people who’d lost limbs in the war. You know it’s a huge, huge number. And of course, you know, one of the acronyms that is now used in in Gaza is “wounded child no surviving family”. You know you have so many children who come in as a result of a missile strike and all the relatives have been killed, and then eventually somebody pitches up and says, I’m a cousin. You know, I managed to come from a different part of Gaza. But you know what’s happening to the children is appalling.
MP: Professor Nazim: I cannot tell you my gratitude and the gratitude of the committee for both you coming here today, but for the work that you’ve done, and if you could express a deep thanks to your colleagues, who are doing the same work day-in day-out. We we’re very grateful and please assure them that you have spoken to us, but we have also heard, and we would do all that we can to act on your very profound testimony. We’ll make sure that it’s heard for everybody that is in a position to make changes on this horrific situation that you’ve described so eloquently to us. Thank you so much for your time I do appreciate it. Thank you, thank you so much.