Israeli drones shooting children in Gaza deliberately ‘day after day’, UK surgeon tells MPs
Professor Nizam Mamode
Dania Akkad reports in Middle East Eye on 13 November 2024:
A retired NHS surgeon who recently returned from working at a hospital in Gaza said he treated children “day after day after day” who had been deliberately targeted by Israeli drones following bomb attacks.
In harrowing testimony to British MPs on Tuesday, Nizam Mamode said of all the conflicts he had worked in, including the genocide in Rwanda, he and other experienced colleagues in Gaza had “never seen anything on this scale ever”.
He said at least once or twice daily, there were “mass casualty incidents,” meaning that 10 to 20 people were killed and up to 40 seriously injured. He estimated that at least 60 percent of the people treated at these times were women and children.
“Drones would come down and pick off civilians, children,” Mamode told members of the International Development Committee in a hearing focused on the humanitarian situation in Gaza.
“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 dropped and this quadcopter came down and hovered over me and shot me’.”
Mamode worked at Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza for a month between August and September for the British charity Medical Aid for Palestine (MAP). He said he spent the entire month in the hospital partly because it was not safe to travel around, but also because Israel bombed MAP’s guest house in southern Gaza in January, an act that Mamode believes was deliberate. “All of those guest houses are in the Israeli army’s computers and are designated safe houses, so my assumption is that it was a deliberate attack and the aim behind it is to discourage aid workers from coming,” Mamode said.
He ascribed the same aim to five Israeli attacks on UN convoys, including one while he was in Gaza. Labour MP and committee chair Sarah Champion asked Mamode to clarify if he meant that rogue snipers were shooting at the armoured vehicles. “No, no,” he said. “This is the Israeli army coming up as a unit and deliberately shooting.”
Mamode said he had been given “very clear instructions” about what to do when travelling in a UN convoy while in Gaza. “The doors are going to be locked when you set off. Do not unlock the doors, if the army shoots at you and order you out. Do not get out of the vehicle,” he said he had been told.
“This is a UN convoy. It’s got UN in big letters on the side and twice a week, it carries about 30 to 40 aid workers from different organisations in and out.”
Mamode said he had to choose whether to sleep in a hot room inside the hospital or outside on stairs where it was cooler, but where drones “had the ability to pick me off”. Mamode later added: “My biggest fear while I was there was being killed by the Israelis.”