A snap shot of Professor Nizam Mamode, a retired NHS transplant surgeon who recently returned from a period working at Nasser hospital in Gaza.
Also giving evidence were representatives from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine (UNWRA) and other aid groups.
41 minutes of the most graphic eyewitness testimony of the 13-month-old Israeli genocidal war on Gaza, that killed and wounded more than 150,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and is starving 2.4 million Palestinians in the strip.
Here are excerts from Professor Mamode testimony:
"Drones would come down and pick off civilians, children, we have description after description, this was day after day after day."
"Operating on children on who say they were laying on the ground after a bomb had dropped and this quadcopter came down, hovered over me and shot me."
"That's clearly a deliberate act. A persisted act. A persistent targeting of civilians, day after day."
"A hospital like Guys & St Thomas where I used to work would get one or two mass casualty events a year, we had one or two a day."
"60% of the people we treated were women and children."
"A seven-year-old is not going to make up a story. The majority of children who were casualties were young children" "The bullets the drones fire are small cuboids. I fished many of those out of children. The youngest I operated on was a 3-year-old."
"There is no question in my mind this was clearly deliberate targeting of civilians."
"I've worked in conflicts around the world. I was there during the Rwandan genocide. I've never seen anything on this scale, ever"
"One of the surgeons in my team had been to Ukraine five times and had said this is ten times worse"
"This is 2.4 million trapped, they can't leave, having bombs dropped on them on a daily basis. And then drones coming in and shooting them."
"There's plenty of evidence out there, from Israeli soldiers, that that's what's going on. We saw the results of it."
“It doesn’t matter who you are in Gaza. If you’re Palestinian, you’re a target.”
Committee responds
Committee Chair Sarah Champion had this to say responding evidence from Professor Mamode.
“The examples Professor Mamode gave us today were profound and deeply chilling. On this evidence, the UK needs to take seriously the prospect of international humanitarian law having been egregiously broken in Gaza."
“The supposedly safe area in which he worked was neither a ‘safe’ nor a ‘humanitarian’ zone, he said, with more than one million people crammed into an increasingly small area. He recalled operating on patients without access at times to basic medical supplies like swabs or sterile gloves."
“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 travelled to Ukraine several times. "
“He saw children with sniper injuries to the head, children shot by drones – evidence, he said, of targeting by the Israeli military. He told the Committee he was aware of five armoured UN convoys, used to travel into and out of Gaza, shot at by Israeli forces.
“But the conflict’s devastating direct impact on the population is just the tip of the iceberg. Professor Mamode informed us that many of the ancillary services that existed before the war – very good hospitals, staffed by very good medics – have been destroyed."
“The Committee will do all we can to act on Professor Mamode’s extraordinary testimony and ensure his experiences are heard loud and clear. If leaders are not yet listening, they should be by now.”
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