British surgeon says Israeli drones ‘deliberately’ shooting children in Gaza

A retired British surgeon who recently returned from a hospital in Gaza says he treated bleeding children who had been deliberately targeted by Israeli drones.

In harrowing testimony to British MPs on Tuesday, Nizam Mamode recounted dealing with daily influxes of bombing and shooting victims while volunteering at Nasser Hospital in the besieged Palestinian territory. 

The 62-year-old surgeon who broke down three times during his testimony said he and other experienced colleagues had “never seen anything on this scale ever.”

“Drones would come down and pick off civilians, children.”

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. 

"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'."

A veteran war surgeon chronicling the horror unfolding inside Gaza hospitals

Dr. Ghassan Abu Sitta, a British-Palestinian plastic surgeon, has been performing non-stop surgeries at Gaza hospitals since October 7 and also chronicling the horror unfolding inside the hospitals.

Nizam Mamode estimated that at least 60 percent of the people treated were women and children.

He provided detailed accounts of his patients, including an 8-year-old girl who he said was bleeding to death during surgery one Saturday evening. "I asked for a swab and they said, 'No more swabs'," he said.

The Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor says the Israeli forces are killing Palestinian children at a rate that is unprecedented in the history of modern wars. The regime's forces have so far killed more than 17,000 children since October 7, 2023, the rights group said.

In recent months, several surgeons who volunteered at hopitals in the Gaza Strip says they were haunted by the harrowing scenes he witnessed in the besieged Palestinian territory. 

Elsewhere in his remarks, Mamode said Israeli forces were frequently attacking humanitarian convoys to discourage aid workers from coming the besieged territory. 

Mamode ascribed the same aim to five Israeli attacks on UN convoys, including one while he was in Gaza. 

He said he spent the entire month in the hospital partly because it was not safe to travel around. 

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." 

"My biggest fear while I was there was being killed by the Israelis," Nizar Mamode.

"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.

According to the Gaza Health Ministry, the Tel Aviv regime has so far killed more than 43,700 Palestinians, mostly women and children, in Gaza, and injured over 103,000 others.

The UN Human Rights Office (OHCHR) has said women and children comprise nearly 70 percent of those killed in the Gaza Strip during Israel’s campaign of genocide in the besieged Palestinian territory. 

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."

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