We were joined by Dr Nada Al-Hadithy, a consultant plastic surgeon who has just returned from Nasser Hospital in Gaza.
Krishnan Guru-Murthy: I suppose when you’re there, you are just surviving and dealing with what you’ve got to deal with.
Nada Al-Hadithy: Yes.
Krishnan Guru-Murthy: Now you’ve come back, how do you reflect on what you’ve been witnessing?
Nada Al-Hadithy: I knew before I went that the situation was absolutely desperate, but nothing could have prepared me for the extent of the starvation that I witnessed firsthand in the patients I was treating. The other thing that really struck me was how relentless the injuries and the casualties coming in were. I was down in ED one day, and the cleaners were working at their absolute maximum, trying to mop up the blood off the floor, and they couldn’t keep up.
And that was one of the days that the Israeli and American food distribution centres had fired on the people at 3 in the morning, where they were asked to be in the middle of the night, having crossed evacuation zones to get food and to get aid. So now that I’m back, I’m thinking, what else can we do to help stop this humanitarian crisis?
“Nothing could have prepared me for the extent of the starvation that I witnessed firsthand in the patients I was treating.”
– Nada Al-Hadithy
Krishnan Guru-Murthy: We are reliant on people like you to get facts out because we’re not there ourselves and there are local journalists as well that we rely on. But obviously the GHF are sort of every day denying these allegations of people being killed near them and saying it’s all sort of propaganda and made up. I mean, from what you’ve seen from the injuries, what do you make of these constant denials?
Nada Al-Hadithy: I think these denials are not accurate. What I have seen from my firsthand experience is a 10-year-old girl who was shot through the leg at one of the GHF sites and subsequently had an amputation. This girl loved dancing before she had an amputation, and this is a life-changing injury. I saw a student nurse shot through his back and out through the front, which led to an aneurysm compressing all of the nerves to his dominant arm, which means that he can no longer use that arm. It’s completely useless. I saw another man shot in the testicles.
And speaking to other colleagues working in the hospital, and let’s just be clear, plastic surgeons weren’t seeing these injuries immediately. I was part of the team that was helping provide the reconstruction after the immediate salvages. But other colleagues that were there with me were saying that they saw a pattern where multiple times they saw many people coming in on the same day, all shot in the testicles, or all shot in the upper quadrant of their stomach. And it looked like there was very specific targeting happening.
Krishnan Guru-Murthy: And what about the targeting in medical staff itself?
Nada Al-Hadithy: So we now know from the UN that over 1,500 medical healthcare workers have been killed. And while I was there, my scrub nurse that I was working with every single day was followed home by a quadcopter drone. And it didn’t kill him on the way home from eyewitness. It waited until he was in his tent and greeted his three children and killed them all. I had another patient that was the wife of a doctor. She was completely emaciated. She’d lost her arm, she’d lost her leg, and she was in a great deal of pain and distress. We didn’t have enough pain relief for her, we didn’t enough drugs, and she had a really significant infection that her body couldn’t fight. She found out that one of my burns patients who was six years old and had devastating 40% TBSA burns, total body surface area burns. Needed vinegar to treat his pseudomonas infection, and the hospital had run out. And she gave it to us for him.
The people of Gaza have so much decency and so much dignity, and they keep on supporting each other and their communities no matter what happens. One of my nurses, I was asking him, he was an incredible nurse. He was so hardworking, so committed. I said, tell me about your life, Hassan. He said, ‘I used to have three children. My youngest was killed six months ago. My eldest was killed just under two years ago. I’ve got one son left.’ I couldn’t imagine a world where my colleagues are losing their children in this capacity, and losing their lives in this way, and still coming to work to do the best for their communities. They are the heroes of this conflict and war.
“We now know from the UN that over 1,500 medical healthcare workers have been killed.”
– Nada Al-Hadithy
Krishnan Guru-Murthy: Will you be able to go back?
Nada Al-Hadithy: I’m hoping to go back. There’s a lot of issues. Fifty per cent of EMT applicants get rejected by Israeli government. And it’s obviously a real problem, especially for plastic surgery, because during the siege for the last 17 years, there hasn’t been the ability of people to move and to get trained. So there are very, very few plastic surgeons left in Gaza. I went before, in March 23, with the Royal College of Surgeons, to train 18 delegates as part of an online longitudinal programme. And four of those 18 delegates are now dead.
One of them is Ahmad al-Maqadmeh, who was found outside Al-Shifa Hospital with hands tied behind his back with his mother, who was a GP, and a bullet to his head. And he was someone that was continuously sending me images of patients that he was doing his absolute best for. And he’d won a fellowship from our Royal College of Surgeons. And yet, we don’t do enough. It’s desperate.
Watch more here:
‘Skin on top of bones’: Gaza aid coming in, but not enough
‘Gaza crisis has simple resolution: open borders to aid’, says David Miliband
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