Original subtitles

We're here in solidarity with our Palestinian health care workers and with

the Palestinian people.

You cannot witness what is happening in Gaza and not emerge enraged and

determined to stop it. There are no independent witnesses allowed, no

investigators, no international journalists allowed in. So as health

care workers, we're the only independent witnesses allowed on the ground. Well,

there are lies, and I think that... The world media need to call them out for

these lies and not keep asking people like me or keep telling us in interviews

that the Israelis claim this hasn't happened.

We're telling people what we have seen with our own eyes. So arguably, I think

that's possibly our greatest role is using our eyewitness accounts

to advocate for the Gazans and to let the rest of the world know what's going

on. It's difficult to understand unless you come here and see the difference

that you make. We always worry when we come here that we might not be of any

use, that we might get all our kit confiscated, that we might not have a

hospital to go to.

But what we always say is the main thing is to come here to bear witness because

you're not seeing what I'm seeing because there's been a complete block to

all media.

The narrative seems to be very controlled.

And so...

To be there and to say, hold on, that's not quite how it looks from the ground.

And to get the footage and to disseminate those pictures is hugely

important.

So I've been going to Gaza for many years. My first visit to Gaza was in

2010.

I'd been going to the West Bank for several years prior to that, and then

someone, it was real serendipity, mentioned, do you want to come to Gaza?

And I said yes.

So that was 2010, and I have very vivid memories of that first trip.

The combination of shock at seeing how much destruction there was back in 2010.

There'd clearly been that massive military assault in 2008, so there's

still a huge amount of destruction there. But the thing that struck me more

than anything was the beautiful people there.

Every time I go to Gaza, I get the same wonderful, warm emotion of the

utterly beautiful people you meet there.

The first time I went to Gaza, I was utterly struck.

by the process of getting in.

First, we had to apply to a permit months in advance.

And then once you get there, it was the Erez crossing at the time, and it just

looks like a massive prison.

And at different points, you know, a door unlocks or a gate unlocks, and you

go into the next step, and they take all your things away.

And you walk through this gated passage for quite some time until you

finally, at the other end, meet...

the Gazantine that's there to welcome you.

So it just felt like an impossible place to enter and an impossible place to

exit.

I think a lot of people think that it was some sort of hovel or some, you

know, backward area of the Middle East, but it's the original.

It's what the Middle East was. It's what Palestine was. And it was...

It's old and lots of buildings need a bit of care, but there's so many other

things going on. There's brand-new universities and beautifully manicured

gardens. Some of the hospitals are pretty impressive.

There is a real buzz and a real zest for life there. They've been living under

this occupation, under this siege, for many, many years, and that was very,

very obvious to all of us all the time we were there.

People like any other people, which...

I think shocked me, given the difficulty of getting in and the fact

that most of the people I met there were born in that very tiny strip of land,

have never left that very tiny strip of land and are not allowed to leave that

very tiny strip of land.

And there's just so much to do that you feel like you're making headway.

Even if it's one patient at a time, you're getting through this massive

amount of work that they have.

I was effectively having two trips a year out in Gaza.

I had a week booked, we had our flights booked to go in October to do a week of

cancer surgery, October 2023, but our flights were booked for October the

21st.

Palestinian militants launched a surprise attack on Israel from the

blockaded Gaza Strip.

Hamas said the attack was in response to Israel's desecration of Al-Aqsa Mosque

and decades of Israeli oppression.

The Israeli government declared a state of war.

I was very, very honoured to be asked to lead the very first EMT emergency

medical team that went in at the end of December 2023.

We had intended to arrive on Christmas Day, but due to a series of delays

being held at security checkpoints in Egypt, we had to spend a night in

Al Arish on the Egyptian side before travelling to the border.

on the morning of the 26th i remember approaching the border from

egyptian rafa and seeing that and we were sort of across the sinai beautiful

sun not a cloud in the sky and you get to gaza and there's this low-lying smoke

just over the whole of gaza from all the bombs and the smell of smoke the smell

of warfare was overpowering as we entered there was a window in which you

had to move.

So we had to move very quickly.

We were under the impression at that time that if you moved on your

designated route within your allotted time, that you would be safe.

Of course, that isn't true, but that's the illusion that many of us are.

hold on to some sense of safety under extremely unsafe circumstances.

I've always seen lots of destruction in Gaza. Every time I've been there, I've

seen lots. But this was on a different level. And we were only in the south of

Gaza. We didn't go to the north. And I've seen photographs of the north where

most of the destruction had taken place. But we still saw a lot of destruction in

the south in Hanunis and Rafah when we were driving through.

on coming through the Rafa crossing, the destruction,

the number of people camped in makeshift

tents, shelters along the side of the road in

abject conditions. Don't forget, I went when it was winter.

It's cold at night.

And people had flimsy bits of plastic that they'd done their best to create

some kind of shelter for themselves and their families.

And we arrived at the guest house. This was about 6 p.m. in the evening. And

around that time, the artillery shelling and the airstrikes started to increase

in frequency.

And the entire night, it was just hundreds of strikes.

The house we were staying in was deliberately in an open area so that

there would be no risk of us being collateral damage.

That was the idea behind it, and it made sense.

But actually, as a result of that, we would hear the explosions very clearly,

and the bombings at night time were terrifying.

My colleague Nick Maynard and I, we slept in the same room, and we kept

the windows and the doors open because of the worry about it.

glass shattering i

remember at one point trying to

to keep track to count each and every explosion and lost count after

several hundred i mean we were hearing extremely loud airstrikes um and then

the kind of the constant noise of

ground artillery on the Israeli side of the armistice line firing into Gaza.

Of course you have the warships off the coastline that are also firing into Gaza

and then heavy gunfire as well.

You could see in the distance looking towards the north of Gaza just orange on

the sky which of course was Gaza City and North Gaza just under constant

bombardment.

My first time back was March 2024.

I actually tried to go in January and February, but the

guest house of the organization I was supposed to be going with, despite being

in a so-called deconflicted zone, was actually bombed by the Israeli military,

and so they canceled our team, and we were postponed.

So we ended up going in March.

And I was based at Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir el-Balah, in the middle area of

Gaza. I was in touch with Ahmed most days, most weeks.

And when I knew I was going, I contacted him and asked him what he needed. At

that time, he'd been evacuated from Shifa and he'd made the journey down to

the European Gaza Hospital.

And we knew that that's where we were going to be posted.

And he sent me a list of equipment that they needed there.

And I put a post out on our British Association of Plastic

Surgery website asking for plastic surgeons around the UK to send me any of

this kit.

And my living room was full of boxes within about a week. The guys from

Ireland sent so much, so much stuff.

My other half, Philip, I think lost the will to live. You couldn't get into our

front room for a couple of months before we left.

And so I packed all this stuff up and we got this flight to Cairo.

So this is where the problem may lie, as to whether we're going to be able to get

all of this through without being stopped and it being taken off of us.

It's Monday the 25th.

of March and it's four o'clock in the morning and our update

is we made it through the airport at Cairo.

We managed to get all 23 suitcases through.

And when we got to the hotel we had booked a minibus. We

managed to get all the luggage into the bus and then we joined the UN convoy and

drove. across the Sinai Desert down to the Rafah border.

We passed all the aid trucks on the way there.

That was probably the first thing that hit me.

They started well before Al Arish.

There were miles and miles of them. I took a video that lasted three minutes

and I didn't start filming at the start and I stopped before it finished.

So that shows you how many aid trucks there were that couldn't get into Rafah.

When we got to the border we decanted the minibus and we had everything x

-rayed and then we waited a while and then our colleagues picked us up on the

other side of the border.

When we got to the European Gaza Hospital, I think the biggest shock for

me was the number of internally displaced people.

I'd worked at the European Gaza Hospital a couple of times on the trips that I'd

done before October the 7th.

So I knew the hospital. It was built in the 80s. It's a beautiful building.

I was last here in 2020 and...

It's completely different.

It's like a different entity.

I don't recognise anything apart from one of the coffee rooms and the recovery

from theatre.

And there's a storeroom that I recognise.

Everything else is just incredible. It looks like some sort of concentration

camp. There were people everywhere when you went into the building.

The corridors were rammed, and as you walked down, on either side of you,

there would be sheets suspended from the ceiling and cornering off small

sections, and behind each section of sheet or carpet would be a mattress on

the floor, and our whole family would be living like that. And that would be on

the stairwell as well, so somebody would have made home halfway up.

a stairwell, and they would have a mattress and all their pots and pans and

some sheets and towels pinned around for some privacy.

And these weren't people that had relatives in the hospital.

If you had a relative in the hospital, you all made your home at your

relatives' beds.

The two largest hospitals in Gaza are Al-Shifa Hospital and Al-Nasr Hospital.

By March 2024, Al-Shifa had already been attacked multiple times.

for the most part destroyed.

So the patients that would be going to those hospitals tended to be coming to

Al-Aqsa, which was now functioning as one of Gaza's main hospitals, even

though it was rather a small hospital prior to October 2023, to the

point that it didn't have a pediatric intensive care unit. It had an adult

intensive care unit.

Although given how many of our casualties were children, I remember at

least nine or ten of the, I think, eleven or so beds were occupied

by injured children.

So it's only our first day here, but it's been pretty rough.

The cases we see reflect essentially the demographics of the population here. So

a lot of elderly, a lot of children, entire families coming in.

It's really tough.

I think I knew watching the news that I would be seeing cases like this.

that I would be seeing a population that was primarily women and children.

But then when you come here and see them for real,

it

hits even harder.

This is a war.

This is a war on civilians.

We were based at Al-Aqsa Hospital, which is in Deir el-Balah. Deir el-Balah is in

the centre of Gaza Strip.

It's a small hospital that normally functions as a maternity, mainly a

maternity block for women giving birth.

I went there to be an obstetrician because it's actually had quite a big

maternity unit.

It also had a reasonable-sized neonatal unit.

Just as I got there, maternity was moved out.

And that's because it was overwhelmed with trauma cases.

operated was to embed ourselves with the team rather than operate in a parallel

fashion. And that made a big difference because actually we managed to then

break down a few barriers with the local doctors who naturally would feel, you

know, what are these international doctors coming here to do? We can do

what they're doing anyway. And I have no qualms about that at all. We were there

to relieve the pressure on them.

There was never a day when we weren't operating.

And sometimes it was complete chaos.

So we were treating patients for the most part on the floor, and we would

often have upwards of eight, ten patients on the floor there.

At times we had to step over patients to reach other patients.

Patients' blood would be mixing on the floor. I mean, it was just horrific,

really. Because of the nature of the weapons that are used, the blasts are so

powerful that a lot of children end up with blast injuries where...

They have internal bleeding or internal damage to, you know, important

organs, vital organs.

So you see nothing on the outside.

The children look unscathed, but they're actually already dead.

Everyone thinks plastic surgery is tits and bums, and it's not.

Plastic surgery is wounds and wound management and trauma.

And in a war, after an orthopedic surgeon... and possibly a general

surgeon. You really need a plastic surgeon.

And probably everybody in Gaza would benefit from seeing a plastic surgeon

just to have a look at their wounds and ways in which we can improve the healing

or close them or clean them.

And so there is so much work to do.

And every time I go, I turn up and I walk into an operating theatre and I

am basically given an operating theatre.

myself, and I just start operating, and I stop when I stop.

I

finally

found him.

He finally came back. I can't believe.

It's a pleasure to be here.

The sad thing is that she came to support me, then she couldn't find me

here.

At least you turned up. Yeah, finally.

It's amazing what you've done here. I'm so proud of you.

Thank you very much. Thank you.

And I think you're continuing with the things you started. It's a pleasure to

work with your team. Your team are absolutely incredible.

Yeah, they're amazing. I cannot believe what you've done.

You're the most famous plastic surgeon.

Honestly, everywhere I go, people say, oh, you know Ahmed, you trained Ahmed.

It was really a great chance. I think what I want to say, the whole of my life

has ended up in this time.

So it's a pleasure to have you. It's a blessing to have all of this.

And you were a good part of the support, you know.

I'm so pleased to be here to carry on.

So I spent a lot of time in the ICU and I spent a lot of time in the emergency

department because it was a period where the area around Al-Aqsa Hospital was

being bombed almost continuously. So we had mass casualty after mass casualty

coming to the emergency department.

And the staff was overwhelmed, the space was overwhelmed.

So I ended up working in the emergency department.

I ended up working, doing ward rounds on the wards, going into theatre.

helping you know where i could for us in the er in the space of those eight hours

we would see the most horrific things that i have ever experienced as as an

emergency doctor i don't claim to have vast clinical experience i've been

qualified for 10 years but i have worked with international humanitarian

organizations in other contexts and i have never seen anywhere else the

things that I have seen in Gaza.

There were no intensive care beds.

They would all end up on a floor somewhere or ended up somewhere else

looked after by their families. The number of patients who had what we would

deem a successful surgery, they went through the operation and they survived

the operation and we did what was deemed appropriate for the treatment.

But the number of those patients who then died three or four days later

because they had no nutrition.

because there were no antibiotics, because there was no one to actually

pick up when things went wrong, and there's no way of being able to, as you

do in intensive care, watch over them like a hawk for the first few days. That

didn't happen.

I lived in the room with two emergency physicians, so they would get alerted

when mass casualties were in, so then we would, by default, know when we'd be

needed.

And you're working with, at some times, no electricity,

instruments, no clean instruments, no gauze. At one point we were running out

of bandages and those patients requiring multiple operations because infection

seeds in. There's no advanced health care anywhere in the world that could

deal with what's happening in Gaza.

The pediatric intensive care doctor is the doctor that's called to the

emergency department when life-threatening things happen to

children.

whether it's a car accident or any other essentially traumatic accident.

I've never seen anything as intensely horrific and

constant inflicted on children.

And I remember thinking to myself, wow, this is two months after the ICJ ruling

on plausible genocide.

This is the worst thing I've ever seen in my life. It can't get worse.

It's Tuesday the 2nd of April and the drones are back.

We've had a slightly worrying tale yesterday in that we saw the news that

Shefa Hospital in Gaza City had been more or less levelled.

Despite unfathomable devastation, they have been

operating and providing emergency services in the Al Shifa complex using

some of the admin and outpatient space that wasn't completely destroyed to

provide an emergency department, a makeshift inpatient unit, and two

operating rooms.

So it's crazy. They're back providing care.

I remember one surgeon, friend of mine, was operating with me, and someone came

in to tell him his sister had just been killed.

And he carried on operating, and he said, I'm sorry, I have to go.

I've been in theatres with another wonderful man who I know well, who I

used to love operating with, who on...

At least two or three occasions during my four weeks would pass out, would

start fainting during the operation because he was so hungry.

Literally, he'd have to sit down and put his head between his legs because he was

so hungry.

Then he'd get up and he said, you know, I'm going to carry on.

We are that vessel to carry their stories.

And I honestly believe as international, as healthcare workers,

we are the vessel of their stories.

The story isn't us. The story is what they are enduring.

But we have been put in this position where we are the vessel to tell their

stories.

We provide them that light reprieve.

We provide them hope, I hope.

And we provide them that we haven't forgotten about them in a world which

overwhelmingly feels that they've been forgotten about.

I think we act as people who tell them every day that we've not forgotten about

them. This is the 7th of April.

We're at the European Gaza Hospital in Khan Yunis.

And what we're doing is trying to have an end-of-term video with Rosie,

Miss Rose, and her volunteers.

They're absolutely star.

Look at this. This is the best team I've ever worked with in my entire life.

Thank you. And I've had the best two weeks ever. Thank you so much.

We really appreciate your effort and you're coming to

help us.

It's really nice.

You've been so welcome. We learned a lot from you. Thanks a lot for that.

I'm very worried about you.

With all this work and so far.

We need to take a photo.

So it is Monday the 8th of April and

it's 10.56 and I'm in a hotel room in Cairo

so I've made it out of Gaza safely and my two-week mission

is over.

Difficult to know what to say, really.

I'm still feeling very guilty that at the end of all of that I can just

walk away back into my very nice, comfortable London life.

And, you know, the remaining population of Gaza have got to still endure

whatever it is that they've got to endure before this is over.

So it's a real double-edged sword.

And it's quite difficult now to imagine how this will

play out and whether when I return I will be able to return

or what I'm going to return to, which is also quite worrying.

I had a second trip.

going in on April the 20th, 2024, again through Rafah, and

leaving Gaza on May the 6th, which was the day that Rafah was invaded, you may

remember, and destroyed. And we were, in fact, the very last people to get out of

Rafah before the Israeli tanks arrived. And we exited through Rafah as bombs

were raining down all around us.

Israeli forces have taken control of Gaza's Rafah crossing at the border with

Egypt. Aid officials warned that Israel's operation cuts off an essential

route for international humanitarian aid, which has been trickling into Gaza

since the war began.

As Israeli forces moved deeper into Gaza, warplanes pounded residential

homes throughout the night and into the morning.

The next time I went back was the August of 2024 and by then the

destruction was far worse.

So packing has been a bit different this time because we're very restricted on

what we can take.

Israelis have said basically it's one bag and...

The total contents of the bag has to be under a certain value.

So it's really stopped me bringing everything that I was going to bring

before.

Most of what I'm bringing now is sort of food, water.

I've got some children's clothes in here and some children's shoes.

A few specific items like charging cables.

that the medical students have asked me to bring.

I've got a computer and a laptop here, and this is the medical equipment that

I'm going to try and get in. I've got a couple of ligaflips for hopefully

some microsurgery, the obligatory 200 cigarettes, water, and

then my operating glasses.

I'm taking a couple of sets, and I'm really hoping that I'm going to be able

to get in this, which is my only tray of instruments, because it's going to

affect what I can do.

We couldn't enter through Rafah then.

That had been taken in the May, and now Israel occupied all

or controlled all the borders.

The European Gaza hospital had been evacuated in the June, so we

knew in the August that we would have to go to Nasser.

Again, Nasser was a hospital that I'd worked at before, so I knew it.

But the entry now was through Kerem Shalom, which is a gate quite

a long way down the south of Israel, very close to the Egyptian border.

Yesterday was a bit of a disappointment.

So we made it this far yesterday. In fact, we made it a bit further.

We got to the Israeli side and through their customs.

And then as we were getting on the bus to make the start of the journey to

Karam Shalom, we heard news that there had been fighting in Rafah and at the

Karam Shalom border.

was closed, so they turned us around and sent us back to Amman.

So we've had a lovely night in Amman at a slightly better hotel.

And now we're back to do the whole thing once more, but hopefully get a bit

further. So we're starting again.

13 and a half hours yesterday, largely in a bus, at several checkpoints, bags

off the bus, bags back on the bus.

Miss Rose's bag is seriously heavy. I'm becoming the world's most perfectly

ruptured man.

But otherwise, spirits are high. The difference this morning was that while

yesterday the bus was full of chatter coming from my mum, today it was

completely silent.

Look, we look like we're moving back onto the bus.

There were only 35 seats on that coach.

They were divvied out by the United Nations, WHO.

We had a chap with us on the August trip who was a scientist and he was tracking

the polio virus.

We had a bomb disposal expert with us. So a huge range of people, but Graham

and I were the only two surgeons on that trip out of 35 people.

So the numbers of people entering had gone down as well.

When the coach gets to Kerem Shalom, you all decant into seven or eight UN

armoured vehicles, and they drive you from there to the OCHA training centre.

And that 15-minute drive, I think, for the first ten minutes, I didn't see

another sign of life. It was just rubble. Everything had been reduced to

rubble. Most of the buildings you couldn't recognise.

Occasionally you'd see the roof of a mosque on the floor.

Or, you know, you'd see bits of a school on the floor, but it was rubble

everywhere and there was no one running around in the streets now.

It was really, really shocking to see how life had changed so much

in such a few months.

This is the burns unit at NASA.

They're just walking through.

It used to be the burns unit at NASA.

We're just walking through to see what's been damaged.

But that's the damage.

Yeah, I'm not going to go too far into this, but wow.

It's amazing.

In the August, the signs of fatigue were evident,

and there was some mental health issues

around the lack of...

items that were coming into Gaza, really.

At that stage, they had put a ban on sanitary products, so the people weren't

getting any shower gel, no soap, no shampoo, no conditioner, no toothpaste.

And when Graeme and I entered in the August, all of our colleagues had texted

us asking us to bring shampoo, soap.

And there was a lot of upset when we got there about how...

How this could be happening to them? How could they be denied these basic items?

And you started to sense that there was some despair about the situation

that they were in.

Actually talking to the staff and learning about them, they've all been

displaced pretty much. No one is originally from Nassau Hospital.

They all worked at Schiffer and Indonesian or hospitals in the north.

And all of them have been displaced now.

All of them have big families.

And one guy just said, you know, I feel like I need a lot of therapy

after this.

And it just doesn't bear to tell what's happening to their mental health living

through this genocide.

Yeah, pretty horrific.

And then we've just met a team.

that have come from the north to our accommodation.

Really nice people, but they said that as they were evacuating from the north,

they were shot at by the Israeli army whilst airstrikes were going on.

Wow, the drone is really loud tonight.

Another day in Gaza.

A situation that no human should have to experience.

And no one should have to witness.

And our colleagues there, that's what they were dealing with.

Hour after hour, day after day, week after week, they have done that for over

two years and still managed to give compassion, to see people as humans,

to do their best, to offer comfort, to try and save their lives.

All the time while they were worrying about their families, what was going to

happen to them, whether they were going to be there when they got home, whether

they'd have to move again.

One of the doctors, who is a good friend of mine, who is a neonatal consultant,

who in fact was the director of neonatal and maternity services at Shifa and the

northern governor.

She had fled with her two... She was a widow. She'd fled with her two teenage

daughters. And she was Al-Aqsa. And it was such a pleasure to see her. I've

seen her on previews. She is a tour de force, this woman.

Absolutely incredible.

And she came to work with her girls.

And that's because she said, you know, in her words, actually, if we die, I

want us all to die together.

And, you know, she was delivering care. She had humor. She was teaching. She was

still writing papers.

You know, she was trying to publish a protocol for how you cope

in the neonatal unit in the middle of a war.

Extraordinary.

Over 1,000 health care workers have been killed in Gaza.

Hundreds of healthcare workers have been held in Israeli captivity.

At least four have been killed while in detention.

Their bodies are still being held.

Every single healthcare worker I met in Gaza has lost family, has lost friends,

has lost colleagues.

Every single healthcare worker I met has been displaced multiple times, has been

forced out of the hospitals where they work.

Many healthcare workers have been killed while trying to rescue the wounded in

what has infamously been called...

Israel's double or triple strike attacks, where a location is struck and

then shortly after it is struck a second and third time once the rescue workers

are there to retrieve the casualties.

Other health care workers have been killed while working in hospitals.

Hospitals and health care workers represent life and the will to keep

people alive.

The systematic and egregious targeting of health care is a line that should

have never been crossed.

like so, so many red lines.

Absolutely massive strike on EGH Hospital.

This is right in front of the emergency room.

People lying on the ground.

Shrapnel everywhere.

Devastation right in the forecourt of the hospital.

Absolutely terrible.

We're standing outside the operation theatre. You can see the damage behind

me. It's not even possible to take any cases to theatre.

It is too dangerous. The theatre's been damaged and the staff, unsurprisingly,

have left at the moment to try and seek safety.

I thought I'd find you.

I hate this.

When I see you, absolute mayhem.

It's a direct hit on the hospital.

I see people milling around the entrance to the hospital.

They're clearing it to enable access for

ambulances, et cetera, to get to the accident and emergency department, which

is right in front of me.

and the maintenance staff were busy inside trying to see if they can get

things repaired so that the theatres will be able to reopen later on today.

It seems that a lot of critical infrastructure

has been destroyed in this war.

Particularly religious buildings, educational buildings and hospitals.

And those really are the centres of a population's culture

and ability to look after itself.

So if they are not Hamas

headquarters, it's difficult to understand why they have been

specifically targeted in the way that they have been targeted.

I've never, ever seen any evidence of Hamas militants or anyone

I'd be suspicious of being Hamas militants in the hospitals. And perhaps

more importantly than that, I've never seen any evidence.

I've had unrestricted access to all the hospitals I've been in, certainly since

October the 7th. I've only been in Nasser Hospital and Al-Aqsa, but

unlimited access. I've been to every single square foot of those hospitals.

Nowhere, there's never been any denied entry.

And Shifa Hospital, I mean, the Israelis have talked about Shifa Hospital being a

command center for decades.

And of course, I know Shifa really, really well from previous trips. It

really does need to be stated that these claims are put out there repeatedly by

the Israelis and parroted by our government, by our ministers, by our

media. There has never been any credible or verifiable evidence.

put forward to support those claims. And it's really important we nail that

because there is no verifiable, there is no credible evidence supporting those

claims. The Israeli military is intentionally destroying life-saving

medical equipment.

I've seen it with my own eyes. I visited the pediatric hospitals that I used to

teach at.

Nasser Pediatric Hospital, so there's Nasser and Nasser, they're two different

hospitals. Nasser Pediatric Hospital is a...

I think the oldest pediatric hospital and the only general pediatric hospital,

or the main general pediatric hospital in the Gaza Strip. You might remember

the name because about a year ago or a little over a year ago, when the Israeli

military forcibly evacuated the hospital and the intensive care staff refused to

leave the patients, the Israeli military assured them that they would be safely.

evacuated, that the patients would, and then they forced them out with arms.

A week later, or when the Palestinians were able to return to the hospital and

the Israeli military had withdrawn, the infants that were attached to

ventilators in the ICU were still there. They were never evacuated.

They were dead, attached to the ventilators and decomposing in their

hospital beds.

That was Nasser. I went back to Nasser. Nasser is flat.

They've destroyed it.

Rentisi, which is the only sub-specialty pediatric hospital in the Gaza Strip,

has mostly been destroyed. It was used as a military base by the Israeli

military, and it was filled with their graffiti and holes,

bullet holes in the motherboards of essential life-saving equipment.

They destroyed everything, so it cannot be...

easily used again for life-saving care.

They also used the Turkish Friendship Hospital, the only cancer hospital in

the Gaza Strip, as a military base, so that cancer services for the over

11,000 patients with cancer in Gaza before October 2023,

where would they receive cancer care?

With the hospitals, it's very hard.

to see what is happening.

We have never been in Gaza and had more than one of the

main four hospitals working at any one time.

It seems to be a sort of one-in-one-out policy.

As one gets back on its feet, another one has to close.

You know, Schiff has been destroyed and then rebuilt and is about to be

destroyed again.

The European Gaza's been evacuated twice.

NASA's been evacuated twice.

It's very... It's very difficult to follow a narrative as to how

this could be justified.

Abdulrahman al-Najjar had been killed this morning in the early hours by a

rocket attack on the home that he was in with his aunt and his cousin.

So we've had a pretty sad day, even more so because Abdulrahman had arranged

for everyone to come to Nasser today to see me, and I booked some time out of my

operating schedule to...

to meet them. And unfortunately, I think the girls were a bit upset, but Hythen

managed to come and we had a bit of a chat and a bit of a mourn. But it's a

very sad day, not just for myself and the team from EGH, but also

for all of the international doctors that have worked with them. And our

group has just been full of messages about the tragic death.

of Abdulrahman. He was an incredible young man that spoke the most perfect

English and everybody is really suffering from the loss of somebody with

such huge potential.

I think that's exactly right. He was an extraordinary young man. He did have a

lot of potential.

He certainly had masses of ambition and he was amazingly helpful in difficult

circumstances. He was once arrested by the IDF.

and was told that he'd never make a doctor.

Quite calmly, he said to them, I will be a doctor.

I'll be an extremely good doctor.

He had that sort of presence.

It's such a waste.

It's such a waste of a talented young life.

Yes, it is.

It is.

God bless you, Abu Rahman.

We've seen it time and time again with our colleagues, with their families,

with our hospitals, with the ambulances, the primary care clinics, the

rehabilitation centers, the centers for the deaf and the blind and the schools

and the universities. I mean, I've shared this with you before, but I've

driven through Gaza and seen how every single structure here, every

single age group, every single...

Every single living thing is on the receiving attack

of this, frankly, genocidal frenzy.

March 2nd, they closed the borders.

It became more and more difficult to get everything in. Well, impossible. We

weren't getting anything in. Medical equipment, food, medicine.

And then things got more and more difficult.

We started running out of certain supplies.

One of the key things I was looking into was...

the whole area of living with chronic illness, but in particular access to

pain medicines.

And that's needed for injuries, it's needed for burns, so for the acute

problems. It's also needed for people who have severe chronic illnesses such

as cancer. And if you can imagine living with an advancing cancer without any

access to treatment and without any pain control.

Pain should be relieved, suffering should be relieved.

And if it has been deliberately not made available,

then that amounts to torture.

Yesterday was terrible.

Hundreds of patients came into the ED of NASA Hospital. We had

multiple laparoscopies all day and all night for major abdominal

and thoracic trauma.

Not just bomb explosions, we've also had gunshot wounds to operate on.

We're seeing terrible, terrible injuries, and it's relentless.

So everyone's already very tired, but clearly that is nothing compared to the

tiredness of all the local healthcare workers.

The malnutrition is shocking.

These patients recovering from such major injuries and major

operations have virtually no nutrition. Now, heroically, some

of the families managed to find...

nutrition we do ward rounds every morning i emphasize the incredible

importance of getting the best possible nutrition and it's remarkable how some

of them do manage to get it but many of them virtually go without food on the

ward

And you okay?

I spoke to one of my colleagues who's the director of pediatrics at one of the

hospitals a few days ago, and he was telling me that at least 70 to 80% of

all children that he sees right now in the hospital are malnourished.

70 to 80% of all children that he's seeing are malnourished.

Malnutrition obviously is very sad in the short run. You know, if you think

about not being able to feed your own children or a child actually starving

and what that means.

But it's also devastating in the long run because...

children's brains are being programmed as they're growing up and we know that

malnutrition has long-lasting impacts to the development of a child's brain and

their potential in the future too.

I had another really shocking visit to the pediatric unit today saw

children who made me cry seeing them my tears my eyes seeing how

unbelievably thin these children are i'm a seven month old little girl who looked

as small as a newborn um literally the expression skin and bones doesn't do it

justice there they had no muscle mass at all every single rib

visible um no energy can't walk just profoundly distressing

Breastmilk fortifier.

Breastmilk fortifier. And you can't get it. You've got none here. So you're

giving this born at 26 weeks.

So it's for older children.

Virtually no formula feed to give these children because it's all being refused

entry by the Israelis.

That was starkly represented to me when one of the American doctors I'm here

with came in a few days ago and had brought in formula feed.

And it was all confiscated by the Israeli border

staff.

Every single thing was confiscated. Other things were allowed in, but all

the formula feed, they specifically targeted that.

And these children recovering from major injuries on the intensive care unit,

nothing to feed them with. No Ensure feeds, no liquid feeds to put down their

nasogastric tubes, no intravenous feedings. And many of them are fed with

dextrose 10%, which is effectively sugar water and of no nutritional value

whatsoever.

And they're losing weight. They're losing weight. They won't recover. Their

wounds will break down.

Their risk of dying is therefore massively greater than otherwise.

So in a way, we expect the injuries from the

ongoing military assault from Israel.

But the malnutrition, the deliberate starvation.

of the Garzlin population seems utterly unconscionable.

If you have, you know, extreme lack of food at the beginning of your pregnancy,

it may affect certain organ growth.

It may affect your brain growth, it may affect your kidneys.

If it happens later in pregnancy, it will have different implications. So

even sort of the time at which...

malnutrition, lack of food happens, has implications for your life chances, for

your development, your chronic illnesses, your intellectual

development.

By the May it was completely different because of the malnutrition and food

wasn't getting in and hadn't got in since the March.

And it was really evident that they were suffering from the effects of

malnutrition that do include, you know, tiredness and depression.

And I definitely saw that in them.

Several of them mentioned that they would rather die than carry on going,

which is really hard to hear from people that you've known for so long.

in the midst of a man-made famine that is the direct consequence of

Israel's deliberate actions and it's absolutely unconscionable.

There has to be a full and immediate re

-evaluation of the way in which aid is delivered to Gaza. It needs to be given

back.

to the organisations that have been running it thoughtlessly since this war

started. The United Nations and its partners have been able to deliver aid

through multiple entry points to the people.

They have never been militarised and they have never asked the population to

travel to them. Not only have they supplied food, but they have also

supplied key services like sanitation, like water,

and like looking after the 42,000 orphans that are now in Gaza.

The

difference

on this, on my last trip, when I was there in June, July 2025,

was the numbers, and I alluded to this earlier, the numbers of gunshot wounds

that we were seeing. And I'd seen a handful of gunshot wounds on previous

trips, mainly from quadcopters, but we saw lots of gunshot wounds from people

who were reportedly being shot at the GHF food distribution points by Israeli

soldiers.

One day they'll see almost exclusively gunshot wounds to the head.

Another day, they'll see gunshot wounds to the neck. Another day, they'll see

gunshot wounds to the abdomen or to the left arm or to the right arm. And it's

almost as if, and this is the way my emergency department colleagues describe

it, whom I know very well, that it's almost like the Israeli soldiers are

playing a game. One day, there were four young teenage boys who came in, all of

whom had been shot in the testicles.

I didn't treat them. They would be treated by the urologist. But we all

used to discuss these patterns.

The clustering of injuries, the pattern of injuries was so striking that it was

inconceivable that it could have been coincidence.

And the only thing any of us could assume was that it was almost like a

game of target practice by the Israeli soldiers.

And it's a behavior which I would never have believed would have been possible

in this world were it not for the fact that I'm witnessing it with my own eyes.

And this is behaviour which is effectively being allowed by our

government, by their refusal to stand up and call out the Israelis for

their war crimes, for their genocidal behaviour.

And I think one of the most devastating aspects of the propaganda around what's

happening in Gaza is the dehumanization.

And dehumanization is the essential component for genocide.

I've had the privilege of working in other places like Rwanda.

These are common elements that run through genocides anywhere in the world.

We've seen this in Palestine in a way that I don't think we've seen anywhere

else to that level, certainly not in modern times.

You know, the destruction of facilities whose role is to care exclusively for

children. destruction of facilities like the Al-Amal IVF clinic,

where over 4,000 embryos were destroyed.

These things are deliberate.

So there's my perception that I feel like I can reach a conclusion within a

single day in the emergency department, or at least a sense of what is being

done to these people.

And then there's the kind of more thoughtful, well, let's think about

what's being targeted.

Children's hospitals, baby formula, medical equipment, medications,

equipment used for life-saving care, health care workers, schools,

universities, refugee camps, bakeries, water and

sanitation plants.

Like everything that's indispensable for life is what's being targeted.

Everything that's indispensable for having hope for a future generation that

prospers is being targeted.

I don't know how my Palestinian healthcare colleagues and friends have

coped, how they've managed over the last 22 months.

But they have coped and they have managed, but quite how, I don't know.

I mentioned earlier, I am in... Words cannot really

do justice to my... My love for them, the awe I have for

them. They are truly, truly inspirational.

I spent four weeks out there in June, July 2025.

I was absolutely exhausted when I got back. I've never known tiredness, lost

it like it. I lost six kilograms in weight.

I was, you know, and it took me weeks to recover.

But that was four weeks.

They've been doing this for 22 months. How they cope, I don't know. They are,

you know, they are true heroes.

Remarkable people.

Very emotional, saying goodbye to everyone.

Tears.

God willing, I'll see them all again.

I can't wait to get home, but terribly sad to leave here.

Terribly sad to leave my friends, my patients.

I think it's much harder to be outside Gaza and see what's happening and not be

doing anything about it.

There's a level of comfort you get the second you cross in and you're like,

well, thank God. Now I'm not a passive observer of genocide. I can actually be

here in solidarity.

Hopefully I can help clinically.

So in a lot of ways, it's a relief to be there in person.

It is also very difficult.

It's very difficult.

I mean, I'm a pediatric ICU doctor, so children often die around me

or experience life-threatening events.

And so I've been around parents often.

when they think they might lose a child or when they actually lose a child.

Gaza's just that continuously.

And it's not losing a child, but it's a child losing everybody in their world.

It's a father losing everybody in his world.

And so there's... It's...

It is very difficult to bear witness to that every single day.

And I think about this often because one of my good friends is a surgeon in Gaza.

And she often says, my heart cannot bear to, she says in

Arabic, to hold this grief anymore. The grief that she's

not necessarily in her direct family.

May God protect them and everyone around her and her friends and who they're

losing and her colleagues and who they're losing.

I've just walked back through the hospital wards with Haitham,

who's walked me back to my accommodation.

And as we walked through one of the wards, all the men were sitting on the

floor around the nurses' station.

And one of them...

was talking and it was the father of Sanad who is the little boy whose

scalp laceration I treated and he was talking

quite sort of strongly to this group of men and so I asked Haitham what he

was saying and Haitham said that he was he was telling the other men that

They had to have courage and that they had to believe in Allah and that they

had a right to be in Palestine and that good would

prevail over them and that they would be able to stay in this land.

And it was just quite, I don't know, good to know that they

haven't lost faith yet.

and that there are still people amongst them that believe that there is a way

out of this situation.

As one of the few international observers allowed into Gaza, I can tell

you, spend just five minutes in a hospital there, and it will become

painfully clear that Palestinians are being intentionally massacred, starved,

and stripped of everything needed to sustain human life.

We've just operated on a...

Seven-year-old who's had a blast injury that's taken a huge chunk out of the

side of her left cheek, back of her left shoulder and her left knee.

And I've just been picking bits of shrapnel out of it and trying to get it

as clean as we can.

Collectively for the past 14 months, we have treated people subjected to

civilian massacre after civilian massacre at the few remaining partially

functioning hospitals in Gaza.

Before her.

I operated on her five-year-old sister, who has got a devastating injury to her

left arm.

She's basically broken the humerus, which is the top bone in the arm.

She's lost 90% of the skin on her arm, and she's lost the outer aspect of her

left hand.

And at the moment, I'm not sure that we're going to be able to save her arm.

And then my colleagues next door, my orthopedic colleagues next door, have

been operating on their mother who has taken a blast injury to both her

shoulders and is missing bone and skin on both her shoulders and they are not

convinced that it's a survivable injury.

Entire families have been eliminated, wiped off of the civil registry.

Our healthcare and humanitarian colleagues are being killed in record

numbers.

We have treated countless children who lost their entire families, a phenomenon

so frequent in Gaza that it's been given a specific name.

Wounded child, no surviving family.

So yeah, not a great day for us here, I'm not going to lie.

And to make matters worse, we've just found out that we are now on the edge of

the active fighting zone, so we can expect the bombing to get much, much

louder. And we have lost...

Four members of the team who have had to go back to their homes with their tents

because they're in the active fighting area and there's an evacuation order on

them. So four of them have left us to go back and evacuate their families. So

we're skeletal staff and, yeah, really bad times right now.

We held the hands of children as they took their last breaths with no one but

a stranger to comfort them.

Those who recovered enough to leave the hospital continued to face the obvious

risk of death, be it through another bombing, starvation, dehydration, or

disease. I remember many people calling it a genocide right from the word go.

And I remember, I remember on October the 8th, talking to Hamis Alessi, my

great, great friend in Gaza, and we were, and talking to various friends, we

were all deeply fearful of what was...

unfolding, what was going to happen.

And I remember people using the word genocide very early. And I was, I don't

know, maybe I was, for whatever reasons, I was a bit reluctant to use it then,

but I've thought a lot about it.

And from what I've witnessed with my own eyes, there is

not a shredded out of my mind that what is going on is a genocide, that what is

going on are multiple war crimes every single day I've been there.

And... very clear evidence of ethnic cleansing.

So this is very clearly a genocide.

It looks like, from what you see, that this is the entire

population that's being targeted.

I don't know what the purpose of that could be, other than to

eradicate them and take the land. And certainly...

Some of the rhetoric that has come from some members of the current

Israeli government support that.

Some of the things that have been said about eradicating every last

one of them, destroying the entire area, turning it into

Auschwitz, does make you worry.

that the game is to eradicate the population.

Coupled with the offensive in the West Bank and the push to gain more land,

the obvious conclusion is that they are trying to

ethnically cleanse the entire region.

The whole of the environment, everything that would support life, and the direct

killing, and both are genocide.

The prevention of safe births is part of genocide.

The deliberate famine and starvation is part of genocide.

And even the sort of tantalising.

My colleague said to me yesterday, we have some food on the shelves.

I feel like the sheep before Eid being fattened up just to be killed.

And what I saw was constant migration of people being driven out. These are not

people voluntarily moving, they're being driven out of their homes in the north.

Them being told that you have to leave or else you are in a fighting zone,

therefore you'll be killed.

The targeting of water collection points.

The fact that electricity was turned off, water was turned off.

The fact that there was nowhere safe.

And the fact that people are telling them, politicians and military

commanders in the Israeli army are telling them that they're going to wipe

Gaza out or flatten it.

Today we published our report analyzing Israel's conduct in the Gaza trip,

a trip pursuant to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime

of Genocide.

The Commission concluded that Israel has committed genocide against the

Palestinian people in Gaza and that it is continuing with that

genocide.

care what you call it you can call it a genocide you can call it ethnic

cleansing mass destruction of the population whatever you want to call it

it is not right it is wrong and it needs to stop it is against every humanitarian

principle we have and it is against international law to treat people in

this way and i think we probably need to spend less time on the semantics of

the definition

and more time on the number of people that are being killed and ways in which

we can stop that.

Particularly after my last trip in June, July 2025, I felt the most

anger I've ever felt at what's going on and real, real

anger at my government for not being brave enough

to stand up and say what's going on because there is unequivocally...

genocide being carried out under under the world's eyes it's being reported

throughout the world there should be an arms embargo there should be

unfiltered aid that's not militarized that what is happening is a

genocide what's happening is ethnic cleansing there's no appetite that I've

seen from the people at the top

Apart from to show that they're listening, but not actually

understanding what we're saying.

And they will be held accountable.

Just like Western media.

No one will be the same after this. I mean, what does it tell us about the

capacity of humankind to enact such barbarity?

And the apathy of so many more who...

are content to sit and watch this happen.

That really questions the very foundations of what it means to

share this planet with other people, frankly.

I think in some ways that our Palestinians are the ones who will

survive with their humanity intact.

Whether they live or die in some sense, if they survive with their humanity

intact, it's others who I think will pay quite a heavy price.

for not having shown that same humanity.

We have to make sure that those who are guilty of this are held to

account. And that doesn't just mean Benjamin Netanyahu and his ministers.

This means other Western politicians who, through their silence, have been

complicit in what is a very obvious genocide.

I'm speaking you today.

both as a member of civil society and as a health care worker who has witnessed

firsthand the death and destruction inflicted upon the Palestinian people.

We spent the last 14 months watching as the most live stream and documented

genocide in history has been met with silence, widespread propaganda campaigns

justifying the unjustifiable, silencing and discrediting those who have

attempted to expose it.

The eyewitnesses that have made it out alive consistently reported crimes that

in any other context would have led to sanctions.

But here, after 14 months of the most grave breaches of humanitarian law,

gross violations of human rights, barbaric war crimes, it is met with

impotence by individuals, countries, and the very institution represented by this

building.

One day, someone will dig up the records of our testimonies, pleading for 14

months. They will dig up the records of Palestinians covering their own genocide

when international journalists were unprecedentedly banned from entering.

Palestinian children setting up press conferences to tell the world that their

lives mattered.

We will have to reckon with that history.

When the world finally turns the page, if it ever does, let it not say that

Gaza was silent.

Let it not imagine we vanished without speaking.

We spoke with mouths filled with dust.

We sang even with broken teeth.

We prayed from fractured knees.

And though the world may have looked away, let this much be remembered.

We named the hunger.

We bore it.

We endured.

Let that remain.

I am in my valley, surrounded by mountains.

My war has begun.

And there is no peace.

You are free and your eyes are wide open.

We know how to sing for you the words of Waasiki.

The mercy of your family is the highest honor. And we are the ones in our eyes

of sadness.

We will be punished because we are used to it. It gets cold and we are the ones

who froze.

Wishing you'd return all my calls. Did you make it? Lord knows they've been

planning for your fall. Did you make it running on your will to resolve through

the fog of the sheep dog? I came to my sense. I hope you make it. Couldn't

fight for you to stay and the right for you to leave at the Afro Asia gate or

the marches of DC. Are we free from the flaws of a falling beast?

Only then we'll believe that we've made it out.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Too little, not too late Hope you ate, and I hope you woke up Better

debate, if we even have a say