On the morning of June 1, Dr Victoria Rose was nearing the end of her 21-day stint as a volunteer in Gaza when she saw news of a mass shooting of Palestinians near a food distribution point.
A senior plastic surgeon in London, Dr Rose, 53, had come to the enclave with a small British charity that has sent medical workers to humanitarian crises in countries including Bosnia and Herzegovina and Sri Lanka.
Dr Rose went straight to the emergency room at Nasser Hospital where she was based, arriving around 8 am. It is the last major hospital still functioning in southern Gaza.
“There were ambulances coming in, just bringing dead people, and then there were donkey-drawn carts bringing dead people,” she recalled in an interview in London. “By about 10 o’clock, we had 20 or so dead bodies, and then easily a hundred or so gunshot wounds.”
In her three weeks at Nasser, Dr Rose said she saw a health system under extreme pressure from an unrelenting stream of people with traumatic injuries.
Compared with her previous two trips during the war, she said, many more patients have suffered “unsurvivable” burns or severe blast injuries from Israeli bombs.
“They weren’t shrapnel wounds anymore — bits of them had been blown off,” she said. “Children were coming in with knees missing and feet missing and hands missing.”
All the patients Dr Rose treated on June 1 said they had been shot by people guarding the food distribution point. Several people, she said, told her they were shot by “crowd control” while running away, although it is not clear what that phrase referred to. Their accounts were consistent with bullet wounds she treated to the back of people’s legs, she said, as well as to the torso and abdomen.
“We’re in that point where people have been reduced to such a level of deprivation that they’re prepared to die for a bagful of rice and a bit of pasta,” she said.
The Israeli military said on June 3 that its forces had fired near “a few” people who strayed from the designated route to the site and who did not respond to warning shots. Then, on June 27, the military said it was investigating “recent reports of incidents of harm” to civilians approaching aid distribution points, including that on June 1, adding that “any allegation of a deviation from the law or IDF directives will be thoroughly examined”.
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation said in a statement that it disagreed that an incident took place “at or in the immediate vicinity of a GHF distribution site” on June 1. It also denied any injuries or fatalities during its operations since the initiative kicked off on May 26. It added, “Gaza is an active war zone, and GHF doesn’t control the area outside of our distribution sites.”
Dr Rose usually works as a senior plastic surgeon at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London. Her specialty is breast reconstruction for cancer patients, but in her 30-year career she has also treated traumatic injuries from road accidents and shootings. That did not prepare her, she said, for the scale of suffering she encountered on three trips to Gaza in the past 14 months. “I’ve not seen this volume and this intensity before,” she said.
The youngest patient she treated was a 3-month-old baby in May, she said, whose abdomen and leg had been badly burned in a bomb blast.
New York Times News Service