Dr Victoria Rose is a consultant plastic surgeon who worked in Gaza hospitals for two separate periods last year. This is her first-hand story of the war in Gaza.
The word “dire” does not adequately describe the situation in Gaza’s hospitals.
On a daily basis when I was working there, I had a list of at least 10 patients, and 60% of them were under the age of 15.
These were tiny children with life-threatening burns and limbs blown off, often losing significant family members in the attacks and left to cope with their life-changing injuries alone.
Dr Victoria Rose in Gaza
I first joined the charity IDEALS, which helps medical professionals during crises, in Gaza in 2019. I returned last year, working with orthopaedic surgeons.
I felt compelled to go back after becoming aware that a plastic surgeon from Gaza who trained with me in London had been inundated with complex trauma cases since the war broke out in October 2023.
Our aim was to deliver essential surgical equipment and assist our colleagues with the increasing trauma workload they faced. But as the war progressed, it became apparent that we had a third objective: to bear witness.
I worked at the European Gaza Hospital in March 2024 and then returned in August of that year for a month, working at Nasser Hospital.
The transformation of the landscape during these two visits was staggering. The streets were unrecognisable, just pile after pile of dust and rubble. Such a scale of destruction could only be justified if every single building in Gaza was part of Hamas’s infrastructure.
In February 2024, we were denied entry by COGAT – part of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) controlling activities in the occupied territories – which, regrettably, has become a standard outcome for 50% of foreign doctors attempting to gain access. However, we managed to regain access in May.
Medics treating patients in Gaza
This mission was intended to last four weeks at the European Gaza Hospital. However, due to its bombing on the day we arrived and its subsequent decommissioning by the IDF, we were redirected to Nasser for three and a half weeks.
The population had now been relentlessly displaced, bombed in their tents, deprived of water and sanitation, and ultimately starved. I remember thinking it couldn’t get any worse – and then they cut the internet.
We ploughed on without essential equipment such as painkillers and antibiotics, patching the patients up, knowing that they were likely to be bombed again.
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When we left the hospital we went into the red zone – an area of active fighting that needed to be evacuated.
This meant that nothing could enter without the journey being “deconflicted” by the IDF. Minimal journeys have thus far been deconflicted. Patients struggle to gain entry, and staff cannot leave, as equipment continues to be depleted.
Much of Gaza has been reduced to rubble by Israeli strikes
Nasser is the only hospital in the south equipped with a CT scanner, a blood bank, ICU capabilities and an oxygen generator.
I work with two orthopaedic surgeons who run the IDEALS charity. They have been travelling to Gaza since 2009.
A severely malnourished child in Gaza
IDEALS started the lower limb reconstruction programme in 2013, visiting Gaza every other month and bringing four orthopaedic surgeons back to the UK for short periods of training.
In 2021, I arranged for a plastic surgeon from Gaza to come to London to train with me. He was an incredible trainee and returned to Gaza in February 2023 to take up the post of chief of plastic surgery at Shifa Hospital.
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Gaza crisis ‘acute’ and continuing
Shortly after the war broke out, I felt compelled to help him.
All eyes are now on Israel’s next move.
Gaza: Doctors On The Frontline will air on Sky News at 9pm on 19 June
On Sky News this week we’re showing a film about Israel’s war in Gaza which has now been going on for more than 620 days.
It is a chastening watch.
Swathes of Gaza’s medical infrastructure have been razed, many of the territory’s buildings have been destroyed, and tens of thousands of Gazans have been killed, maimed and left hungry and malnourished in a war fought mainly from the air with heavy ordinance dropped on crowded civilian areas.
These extraordinary eyewitness accounts are not brought to our screens by experienced international war correspondents – they are barred from entering Gaza – but by two British medics whose mission was to save lives not to report on the horrors of war.
That visiting surgeons Victoria Rose and Tom Potokar felt compelled to do just that, speaks not only to the tragedy unfolding in Gaza, but to the swingeing restrictions imposed on reporting what is happening there.
In the history of modern warfare, the presence of journalists on the battlefield has been essential in holding the combatants to account and ensuring that war crimes and atrocities are uncovered and prevented.
And Israel stands accused of egregious crimes in Gaza.
Since it launched its war there in response to the Hamas terror attacks of October 7th 2023, in which around 1,200 Israelis and other nationals were murdered and a further 250 taken hostage, more than 55,000 Palestinians have been killed according to the Gazan health authorities. Many of the dead have been women and children.
Earlier this month, former US State Department official Matt Miller told the Sky News Trump100 podcast that Israel had committed war crimes in Gaza. Ex-UN humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths went further, telling Sky News presenter Yalda Hakim that Israel is responsible for genocide there.
It’s an accusation supported by Ireland, Spain, and South Africa which is pursuing Israel for genocide at the International Court of Justice – the UN’s highest court.
Jonathan Levy. Pic: Sky News
Israel rejects the case against it, claiming that many of the dead are Hamas fighters who have been hiding in tunnels under the hospitals that it has the right to attack in self-defence.
Israeli officials and diplomats deny that its military targets women and children and react with outrage to the suggestion that it is responsible for ethnic cleansing or genocide – accusations of crimes against humanity that are taken as particularly loaded given the dark resonance they have for the Jewish people.
But Israel’s confidence in the integrity of its wartime conduct is not matched by a willingness to allow international journalists into Gaza to witness what is going on there for themselves.
Military-organised ’embeds’ fall well short of independent journalism
For the course of its longest war, no reporters have been permitted entry to Gaza other than on organised and controlled ’embeds’ of a few hours alongside Israeli soldiers.
These managed opportunities fall well short of independent journalism, for which Sky News and other global news organisations must rely on trusted and heroic local reporting teams who lack the support and infrastructure to provide a complete picture of what is going on.
And these Palestinian journalists have paid a heavy price for their work; according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 185 of them have been killed during the war and 86 imprisoned.
The Foreign Press Association, which represents the interests of international journalists operating in Israel, has been petitioning its High Court of Justice to lift the ban on reporting independently from Gaza.
So far, that legal action has been unsuccessful and last month the court again postponed a hearing in the case without reason or setting a new date.
Israeli officials push back on the need and suitability of allowing journalists to operate independently in Gaza. They say that their military’s priority is the rescue of the remaining hostages and the fight against Hamas and that the safety of reporters could not be ensured.
But journalists from Sky News and fellow news organisations have operated in Gaza in previous conflicts, providing details of their location and movements to the Israel Defence Forces.
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‘We accept the risks’
Moreover, we have decades of experience of covering conflict zones and our reporters are highly trained at doing so. The risks are real, for sure. But they’re risks that we accept. It’s what we do.
The ongoing denial of access to Gaza feels much less about the safety of journalists and more about preventing proper scrutiny and accountability of the desperate situation there.
Medics treating patients in Gaza
The barring of international journalists is accompanied by the active delegitimisation of what reporting on the war has been possible which is often shamefully labelled as anti-Semitic and compared to the darkest periods in Jewish history.
All together this constitutes a war on truth that is at odds with Israel’s proud and oft-repeated claim to be the Middle East’s only democracy and it should not be allowed to stand.
Gaza: Doctors On The Frontline will air on Sky News at 9pm on 19 June
US President Donald Trump says he has yet to decide whether the US will join Israel militarily in its campaign against Iran.
Asked whether the US was getting closer to striking Iran’s nuclear facilities, Mr Trump said: “I may do it. I may not do it.”
Speaking outside the White House on Wednesday, he added: “Nobody knows what I’m going to do…Iran’s got a lot of trouble, and they want to negotiate.
“And I said, ‘why didn’t you negotiate with me before all this death and destruction?'”
Mr Trump said Iran had reached out to Washington, a claim Tehran denied, with Iran’s mission to the UN responding: “No Iranian official has ever asked to grovel at the gates of the White House.”
Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Iran would not surrender and warned “any US military intervention will undoubtedly cause irreparable damage” to US-Iranian relations.
Read more:
Why did Israel attack Iran?
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The families caught up in Iran-Israel attacks
Strikes continue
Hundreds have reportedly died since Iran and Israel began exchanging strikes last Friday, when Israel launched an air assault after saying it had concluded Iran was on the verge of developing a nuclear weapon, a claim Tehran denies.
Israel launched three waves of aerial attacks on Iran in the last 24 hours, military spokesman Brigadier General Effie Defrin has said.
Israel deployed dozens of warplanes to strike over 60 targets in Tehran and western Iran, including missile launchers and missile-production sites, he said.
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Can Iran’s leadership be toppled?
“The aim of the operation is to eliminate the existential threat to the State of Israel, significantly damage Iran’s nuclear programme in all its components, and severely impact its missile array,” he said.
Early on Thursday Israel issued an evacuation warning to residents of the Iranian Arak and Khandab regions where Iran has heavy water reactor facilities. Heavy water is important in controlling chain reactions in the production of weapons grade plutonium.
Meanwhile Iran says it has arrested 18 people it describes as “enemy agents” who it says were building drones for the Israelis in the northern city of Mashhad.
Iran also launched small barrages of missiles at Israel on Wednesday with no reports of casualties. Israel has now eased some restrictions for its civilians.
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Read more:
Trump’s words designed to stoke tension, confuse and apply intense pressure on Iran
MAGA civil war breaks out over Trump’s potential decision to join conflict with Iran
The US is working to evacuate its citizens from Israel by arranging flights and cruise ship departures, the US ambassador to the country has said.
In the UK, Sir Keir Starmer chaired a COBRA emergency meeting on the situation in the Middle East, with a Downing Street spokesperson saying: “Ministers were updated on efforts to support British nationals in region and protect regional security, as well as ongoing diplomatic efforts”.
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