A retired NHS surgeon who recently returned from working at a hospital in Loop He said he treated children “day after day after day” who had been deliberately targeted by Israeli drones following bomb attacks.

In heartbreaking testimony to British parliamentarians on Tuesday, Nizam Mamode saying Of all the conflicts he had worked on, including the genocide in Rwanda, he and other experienced colleagues in Gaza had “never seen anything on this scale.”

He said “mass casualty incidents” occurred at least once or twice a day, meaning between 10 and 20 people were killed and up to 40 seriously injured. He estimated that at least 60 percent of the people treated at that time were women and children.

“The drones were coming down and attacking civilians and children,” Mamode told members of the International Development Committee in an audience focused on the humanitarian situation in Gaza.

“This is not an occasional thing. It was day after day operating on kids who said, ‘I was lying on the ground after a bomb hit and this quadcopter fell 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, but also because Israel MAP guest house bombed in southern Gaza in January, an act Mamode believes was deliberate.

“All of those guest houses are on the Israeli army’s computers and are designated as safe houses, so my assumption is that it was a deliberate attack and the goal behind this is to deter aid workers from coming,” Mamode said.

It attributed the same objective to five Israeli attacks on UN convoys, including one while in Gaza.

Labor MP and committee chair Sarah Champion asked Mamode to clarify whether he meant that rebel snipers were shooting at the armored vehicles.

“No, no,” he said. “This is the Israeli army approaching as a unit and shooting deliberately.”

‘My biggest fear while I was there was that the Israelis would kill me’

– Nizar Mamode, surgeon

Mamode said he had been given “very clear instructions” on what to do when traveling in a UN convoy while in Gaza.

“The doors will be locked when you exit. Do not open them if the army shoots at you and orders you to get out. Do not get out of the vehicle,” he said he had been told.

“This is a UN convoy. It has the UN in big letters on the side and twice a week it transports 30 to 40 aid workers from different organizations in and out.”

Mamode said he had to choose whether to sleep in a warm room inside the hospital or outside on the stairs, where it was cooler, but where the drones “had the ability to take me out.”

Mamode later added: “My biggest fear while I was there was that the Israelis would kill me.”

Worms in wounds

The 62-year-old surgeon collapsed three times during his testimony as he gave detailed accounts of his patients, including an 8-year-old girl who he said was bleeding to death during surgery on a Saturday night.

“I asked for a swab and they said, ‘No more swabs,'” he said, momentarily unable to speak.

Mamode said the lack of medical supplies as a result of Israel not allowing aid into Gaza included sterile gloves, curtains and painkillers, but also basic items such as soap and shampoo, leading to unhygienic conditions.

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“I saw I don’t know how many wounds with maggots. One of my colleagues took maggots out of the throat of a child in intensive care,” he said. “There were flies in the operating room that landed on the wounds.”

He and his colleagues were especially concerned about a pattern of wounds (three or four gunshot wounds to the left and right sides of the chest and also the groin area) caused by drones.

“That we thought was prima facie evidence of an autonomous or semi-autonomous drone because a human operator would not be able to fire with the degree of accuracy that quickly,” Mamode said.

But he also said the pellets fired by most drones were also more destructive than bullets that would pass through a body. Instead, the pellets bounced off the bodies.

A seven-year-old boy, one of the children who had told Mamode that he had been in a bombing raid and then deliberately hit by a drone, arrived at the hospital with his stomach hanging out of his chest and with further injuries to his liver. , spleen, intestine and arteries.

“He survived and came out a week later,” he said. “I don’t know if he’s still alive.”

‘They took him and killed him’

When an MP asked Mamode if he had seen Hamas while working, the doctor laughed.

“I laugh because it was a question I asked when I got there. ‘So, is Hamas in the hospital?’ And they just laughed at me,” he said.

“They said, ‘There is no Hamas. There are some fighters hiding in tunnels. There is no Hamas. There was never any Hamas in the hospital. Everyone hates Hamas.'”

Mamode said that in other conflict zones, fighters often enter with weapons in obvious ways.

“We never saw anything like that. They allowed us to go wherever we wanted in the hospital,” he said.

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“There could have been a tunnel underneath. Who knows? But if Hamas had been coming and going in the hospital, it would have been pretty obvious.”

His Palestinian colleagues told Mamode that when Israeli forces attacked the hospital in February, killing staff members and locking them up a common grave with patientsmany other colleagues were arrested.

One of them included an atheist. “I hated Hamas and before the war I talked about that stuff a lot. I just thought Islam was stupid and I thought Hamas was stupid,” Mamode said he was told.

“They just took him away and killed him. That’s what’s happening. As far as I can see, it doesn’t matter who you are in Gaza. If you’re a Palestinian in Gaza, you’re a target,” he said.

Champion said Mamode’s testimony was “deep and chilling.”

He said: “Based on this evidence, the UK must take seriously the prospect that international humanitarian law has been flagrantly violated in Gaza.”

The committee hearing came as a 30-day deadline the US government set for Israel last month to ensure more aid came into Gaza and was approved by NGOs. warning that the situation in northern Gaza is “even more serious today than a month ago.”

Hours after Mamode provided evidence, the Biden administration said it would not limit arms transfers to Israel as it had threatened, saying Israel had taken “a number of steps” to address the demands it had made.

“At this time we have not assessed that the Israelis are violating US law,” State Department spokesman Vedant Patel said. “We will continue to evaluate their compliance with US law. We have seen some progress. We would like to see more changes come.”