A Palestinian searches for relatives under rubble of building bombed by Israel in Beit Lahia
AFP

A top UK surgeon broke down while recounting his experience at Gaza's Nasser Hospital during an evidence session on the healthcare situation in what was once the largest city in the State of Palestine.

"What I think I found particularly disturbing was that a bomb would drop, maybe on a crowded, tented area, and then the drones would come down," Professor Nizam Mamode told the UK Parliament during the International Development Committee's session before he was overcome with emotion.

In the clip, Committee Chair Sarah Champion then stepped in to thank the former surgeon for attending the session to help hold legislators accountable.

"I can only imagine just how it has impacted you and it will continue to impact you, I feel, because you can't unsee what you've seen but being able to share that with us really helps us hold legislators, particularly, to account," Champion added before Mamode continued.

"The drones would come down and pick off civilians, children, and we had description after description," Mamode said. "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 had dropped and this quadcopter came down and hovered over me and shot me.'"

Mamode added that this type of targeting, mostly of women and children, was "clearly a deliberate act and it was a persistent act" in which Israel Defense Forces persistently targeting civilians everyday.

"We had one or two mass casualty incidents every day," Mamode added.

He told The National that meant at least 10 to 20 people were killed and up to 40 injured every day.

"If this isn't a genocide, then I don't know what is," he added.

Mamode has volunteered as a doctor during other conflicts, including the Rwandan genocide in 1994, but said Gaza was unlike any other.

"It's astonishing," he told The National. "I've never come across a conflict zone where there is deliberate restrictions on medical supplies and medical aid for healthcare workers trying to deal with civilian casualties."

Following the evidence session, Champion released a comment, writing, "If leaders are not yet listening, they should be by now."

"Professor Mamode told us that he has worked in a number of dangerous conflict zones, including the Rwandan genocide. Yet still he had never seen anything on the scale of what he saw in Gaza. This view was no outlier; it was also that of his experienced colleagues, one of whom had traveled to Ukraine several times," she shared.

She added he also "saw children with sniper injuries to the head, children shot by drones – evidence, he said, of targeting by the Israeli military."

Originally published by Latin Times

Israel