Amputations, badly burned bomb victims and lack of medicine British surgeons on life in Gaza

Doctors are a very special category of people. Doctors who opt to work in war zones are an entirely different level of special.

They take their skills and medical experience into the most dangerous of environments, knowing they risk their own lives in their mission to save others. Yet they do this regardless.

The British doctors who we came to know and immensely respect at the centre of our report, Gaza: Doctors on the Frontline, don’t see themselves as heroes or even remarkable for what they’ve done over the past few weeks in Gaza.

That, of course, is what makes them even more remarkable.

“This shouldn’t be about us,” Dr Tom Potokar scolded us more than once.

“This should be about what’s happening to the Palestinians and health workers inside Gaza.”

But like it or not, the daily video blogs the travelling doctors did about their experiences on the ground in Gaza resonated with viewers.

They sent us searing accounts of their daily lives while in Gaza. They told us of having to stitch together mostly young broken bodies, torn apart by repeated Israeli bombs.

They talked of having to perform amputations on the young, of trying to stem the pain and infections on badly burned bomb victims and of the lack of common medicines.

They fumed at what they saw as political ‘complicity’ from the international community for not doing enough to end the war. They begged for aid to be allowed in.

They spoke from the heart as humanitarians and doctors but also witnesses – and we saw them tired, frustrated, angry at times, maybe a little anxious, certainly emotional.

And yet, all the time they realised how they were just visitors in Gaza while their patients, their medical co-workers and their colleagues’ families were all living this permanently, with no escape while just trying to survive. Many do not.

“What do you say to a seven-year-old who’s lost both her legs,” Dr Tom says in one heart-wrenching vlog.

“Most of my patients are children,” Dr Victoria Rose tells us in another. We see her fall in love with a badly burned toddler, so swathed in bandages, only his face was uncovered.

“This is my favourite little guy,” she says in her vlog about three-year-old Haitum, “he has 35% burns”.

“That’s a lot for a little guy,” she goes on. And the tens of thousands who watched her updates on social media platforms fell in love with the little boy too.

Viewers see how Haitum was far from an exceptional case too. “My first three patients today were under 12,” we learn from Dr Victoria in another post.

The two surgeons were in small teams sent into the battlefield courtesy of the IDEALS charity, which funded their trip.

Their limited time in the Gaza Strip turned out to be of an intensity which both recognised as unmatched before by either of them.

They witnessed alongside their patients and fellow medics, daily and nightly bombings; gunfire; dwindling medical supplies and saw the dire lack of food.

They treated tiny skeletal bodies desperate for sustenance – and helped mass evacuations of badly wounded patients from the fast-disappearing health facilities.

‘No one is safe’

“There just seems to be indiscriminate bombing,” Dr Victoria says of the Israeli bombardment. “No one is safe – whether you’re a woman, man, child or health worker.

“But there seems to be a systematic pattern of attacking infrastructure, particularly around health provision.”

She goes on to cite how she’s observed the Israeli attacks focus on taking out the hospital water supplies, then the power source, as well as declaring red zones or implementing evacuation orders around health facilities to make it difficult for patients to access the hospital and for staff to travel into work.

The Israeli authorities have an alternative narrative – the Israeli Defence Forces claim they are carrying out “precision strikes”, insist Hamas is using patients as human shields and say they’ve uncovered vast military command centres beneath hospitals – including the European Gaza.

Conflicting accounts

The doctors – equally insistently – say they’ve seen no arms in the hospitals and have seen no evidence of Hamas command centres or tunnels beneath.

Dr Tom rang me while our team was on assignment in Somalia. “You won’t have heard but the European Gaza Hospital has been bombed,” he said, “I’ll send you the videos”.

He shuns social media and has no accounts, but he’s a veteran who’s been travelling to Gaza for the past seven years, and he knew very well the importance of what he was witnessing on the ground and living through.

He’s extremely experienced and has travelled across the globe working in war zones like Cambodia and Lebanon, and is a former chief surgeon for the International Red Cross.

He’s also a burns specialist with his own international charity called Interburns. “If Cambodia was the killing fields, Gaza is the slaughterhouse,” he says about his most recent time inside Gaza.

Dr Victoria Rose is an NHS plastic surgeon based in London and was on her third trip to Gaza. She talks frankly of being motivated to go after helping to mentor Gaza surgeons who’d travelled to Britain to learn extra skills some years ago.

“We saw them struggling in Gaza and I felt I just had to help,” she explains. She videoed everything – unstintingly – and has her own Instagram handle @rosieplasticsurgeon.

She teases Dr Tom – on camera of course – about his lack of digital awareness. “This is the man who calls it Facetube, aren’t you Tom?”

The two have very different approaches but mutual respect. And both realised their job in Gaza was twofold. They had to bear witness. They had to report.

Running past huge craters

They had to provide insight into what fellow Palestinian medics are up against in Gaza; how hospitals – protected under international law – are being affected, and how ordinary Gazan civilians are suffering.

So, Dr Tom took us into the heart of the European Gaza Hospital minutes after Israeli forces dropped multiple bombs around the complex.

We saw him racing through the car park outside the Emergency Department and past huge craters and rubble.

He delivered commentary as he ran through the smoke-filled corridors to try to find his anaesthetist. He showed us the repeated bombings a day later – and the scramble to get injured patients out to safety.

The two surgeons may be very different people. But both are highly regarded in their fields and have been brought together by a burning desire to help the wounded and injured in Gaza as well as their fellow medics on the frontline.

They also both entered Gaza with the knowledge that foreign journalists are barred from the territory – and many of those inside have been killed or maimed – so it fell to them, the doctors, to be the witnesses during their stay in Gaza and beyond.

“It’s really not something I’m comfortable with,” Dr Tom said. “For a start, it takes up a lot of time! But it’s important people see what’s going on here.

“The question people should be asking is, why are foreign journalists being barred? What is it the Israelis do not want people to see?”

Analysis: Jonathan Levy – Israel’s block on international journalists in Gaza should not be allowed to stand

Dr Victoria texted a lot about her fears that Nasser Hospital, where the two travelling teams finally end up, may face the same fate as the European Gaza – evacuated and now out of action.

“We’ve got to keep on reminding people what’s going on here because Nasser is the last functioning hospital in the south, and if it has to be evacuated, it will have tragic consequences for the civilians here. Hundreds will die,” she says.

The film is a graphic, often painful watch of human endurance, tragedy, pain and survival – told through the eyes of two exceptional and inspiring surgeons who felt their duty as doctors also meant they should lay bare what’s happening inside the Gaza Strip – and what is still happening – while the world’s focus has shifted elsewhere.

Gaza: Doctors On The Frontline will air on Sky News at 9pm on 19 June