After years working in some of the harshest war zones in the world surgeon Nizam Mamode thought he had witnessed the worst human suffering imaginable.
But nothing could have prepared him for the horrors he experienced during two months in “apocalyptic” Gaza treating victims of Israel’s war with Hamas.
In an interview with the Sunday Mail, he has described seeing daily “mass casualties” of women and children he believed were being deliberately targeted by snipers, drones and missile strikes.
The transplant specialist, who spent time working in Rwanda during the country’s 1994 genocide, said: “I have been in a number of conflict zones and one of the surgeons who was with me had been on five missions to Ukraine, but what we saw there was so much worse than anything either of us had ever experienced before.
“It was utterly shocking, like everyone I had been following events in the media but when you actually go there you realise how bad it is.
“I crossed into Gaza from Israel and for about 20 minutes we were just driving through an apocalyptic landscape.
“It reminded me of an atomic bomb, pictures I have seen of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Everything is just flattened in every direction for miles, nothing growing, just dust. No people, just a few looters here and there.
“And then you get to the central area packed with people in makeshift tents made out of bits of carpet in the so called Green Zone.
“And then bombs are just dropping day and night. You hear drones all the time, they are a permanent feature of life.
“The drones had been there before the war but they were only carrying out surveillance, now they are armed and capable of shooting.
“So that is very draining and stressful for people. You are constantly looking for them, hoping they are not coming in your direction.”
Nizam worked at Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza for a month between August and September with the British charity Medical Aid for Palestine (MAP).
In harrowing testimony to MPs earlier this month the 62-year-old broke down three time as he described daily “mass casualty incidents” with 10 to 20 people killed and up to 40 seriously injured. He said at least 60 percent of the victims were women and children.
He added: “The hospital was just jam packed, we were doing amputations without anaesthetic and people were having to take paracetamol afterwards.
“The conditions are just horrific, you are operating with flies constantly landing in the wounds, we had maggots in wounds, the infection rates in surgery were extremely high and many people are dying from infections.
“What struck me most was that there is no escape for the Palestinians, they are just stuck in this central area and even within that area they are often being displaced.
“Most people have been displaced six to eight times, they are living in tents and suddenly they are given an evacuation order to leave a particular zone and the bombing might start minutes later so they have to pack up their tent and run.
“There is no running water so the whole thing is just utterly awful. We were told that we couldn’t take in medical supplies apart from for our personal use.
“That was a change of earlier in the war when medics were allowed to take in some equipment to treat fractures but now the trucks are being stopped.”
Nizam – who was previously clinical lead of transplant surgery at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust in London and honorary consultant at Great Ormond Street Hospital – studied at the University of Glasgow and worked for years in the city and across Ayrshire.
The 62-year-old trained in many of the surgery techniques being put to use in to use in Gaza at Glasgow Royal Infirmary.
He is now retired from the NHS but spends much of his time on international humanitarian missions including trips to Armenia and Mauritius this year to help with transplant programmes.
He also intends to go to Lebanon to help treat victims of the war there. The dad-of-one lives between Scotland on his boat in the summer and winter in Hampshire.
He added: “Normally in a war you have two armies trading missiles and artillery or shooting at each other, but as far as I could tell you have a few Hamas fighters who will occasionally pop out of a tunnel or a building and fire a machine gun or a rocket propelled grenade but that is it.
“The Israeli army have bombed buildings containing large numbers of civilians and they claim they are Hamas command and control centres but don’t appear to have to give much evidence of this.
“It was certainly clear from casualties that I was seeing that civilians were being deliberately targeted.
“It is extremely shocking that drones are going it to target survivors of missile strikes. On a daily basis I was seeing women and children who had been deliberately targeted by drones.
“We also saw children with single bullet wounds to the dead, no other injuries, so you have to conclude that it was a sniper.
“I have been asked to go back and I intend to do that. My hope was that the war would stop and I would go back and help with the reconstruction but there is no sign of that at the moment.”
Israel’s assault on Gaza began after the October 7 Hamas attack on the country last year which killed around 1,200 people. More than 250 hostages were also taken.
During his evidence session to members of the International Development Committee Nizam said his greatest fear while in Gaza was being killed himself by the Israelis.
He said: “Drones would come down and pick off civilians, children. 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 dropped and this quadcopter came down and hovered over me and shot me’.”
He momentarily broke down while describing operating on an eight-year-old girl who he said was bleeding to death and being told there was no more swabs.
He also described what he believed was evidence of “autonomous or semi-autonomous drone attacks” because a human operator would not be able to fire with the degree of accuracy so quickly.