Amputations, badly burned bomb victims and lack of medicine: British surgeons on life in Gaza
Doctors are a very special category of people. Doctors who opt to work in war zones are an entirely different level of special.
They take their skills and medical experience into the most dangerous of environments, knowing they risk their own lives in their mission to save others. Yet they do this regardless.
Warning: This article contains details and images that some readers may find distressing.
Dr Tom Potokar performing surgery in Gaza
The British doctors who we came to know and immensely respect at the centre of our report, Gaza: Doctors on the Frontline, don’t see themselves as heroes or even remarkable for what they’ve done over the past few weeks in Gaza.
That, of course, is what makes them even more remarkable.
“This shouldn’t be about us,” Dr Tom Potokar scolded us more than once.
“This should be about what’s happening to the Palestinians and health workers inside Gaza.”
But like it or not, the daily video blogs the travelling doctors did about their experiences on the ground in Gaza resonated with viewers.
They sent us searing accounts of their daily lives while in Gaza. They told us of having to stitch together mostly young broken bodies, torn apart by repeated Israeli bombs.
They talked of having to perform amputations on the young, of trying to stem the pain and infections on badly burned bomb victims and of the lack of common medicines.
They fumed at what they saw as political ‘complicity’ from the international community for not doing enough to end the war. They begged for aid to be allowed in.
They spoke from the heart as humanitarians and doctors but also witnesses – and we saw them tired, frustrated, angry at times, maybe a little anxious, certainly emotional.
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British surgeon records video diary from Gaza
And yet, all the time they realised how they were just visitors in Gaza while their patients, their medical co-workers and their colleagues’ families were all living this permanently, with no escape while just trying to survive. Many do not.
“What do you say to a seven-year-old who’s lost both her legs,” Dr Tom says in one heart-wrenching vlog.
“Most of my patients are children,” Dr Victoria Rose tells us in another. We see her fall in love with a badly burned toddler, so swathed in bandages, only his face was uncovered.
“This is my favourite little guy,” she says in her vlog about three-year-old Haitum, “he has 35% burns”.
Haitum, a three-year-old Palestinian being treated by Dr Victoria Rose
“That’s a lot for a little guy,” she goes on. And the tens of thousands who watched her updates on social media platforms fell in love with the little boy too.
Viewers see how Haitum was far from an exceptional case too. “My first three patients today were under 12,” we learn from Dr Victoria in another post.
Read more from Dr Victoria Rose: ‘I felt I had to go back to help’
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Inside Gaza hospital after shooting
The two surgeons were in small teams sent into the battlefield courtesy of the IDEALS charity, which funded their trip.
Their limited time in the Gaza Strip turned out to be of an intensity which both recognised as unmatched before by either of them.
They witnessed alongside their patients and fellow medics, daily and nightly bombings; gunfire; dwindling medical supplies and saw the dire lack of food.
They treated tiny skeletal bodies desperate for sustenance – and helped mass evacuations of badly wounded patients from the fast-disappearing health facilities.
A severely malnourished child in Gaza
‘No one is safe’
“There just seems to be indiscriminate bombing,” Dr Victoria says of the Israeli bombardment. “No one is safe – whether you’re a woman, man, child or health worker.
“But there seems to be a systematic pattern of attacking infrastructure, particularly around health provision.”
She goes on to cite how she’s observed the Israeli attacks focus on taking out the hospital water supplies, then the power source, as well as declaring red zones or implementing evacuation orders around health facilities to make it difficult for patients to access the hospital and for staff to travel into work.
The Israeli authorities have an alternative narrative – the Israeli Defence Forces claim they are carrying out “precision strikes”, insist Hamas is using patients as human shields and say they’ve uncovered vast military command centres beneath hospitals – including the European Gaza.
Much of Gaza has been reduced to rubble by Israeli strikes
Conflicting accounts
The doctors – equally insistently – say they’ve seen no arms in the hospitals and have seen no evidence of Hamas command centres or tunnels beneath.
Dr Tom rang me while our team was on assignment in Somalia. “You won’t have heard but the European Gaza Hospital has been bombed,” he said, “I’ll send you the videos”.
He shuns social media and has no accounts, but he’s a veteran who’s been travelling to Gaza for the past seven years, and he knew very well the importance of what he was witnessing on the ground and living through.
He’s extremely experienced and has travelled across the globe working in war zones like Cambodia and Lebanon, and is a former chief surgeon for the International Red Cross.
He’s also a burns specialist with his own international charity called Interburns. “If Cambodia was the killing fields, Gaza is the slaughterhouse,” he says about his most recent time inside Gaza.
Dr Tom Potokar
Dr Victoria Rose is an NHS plastic surgeon based in London and was on her third trip to Gaza. She talks frankly of being motivated to go after helping to mentor Gaza surgeons who’d travelled to Britain to learn extra skills some years ago.
“We saw them struggling in Gaza and I felt I just had to help,” she explains. She videoed everything – unstintingly – and has her own Instagram handle @rosieplasticsurgeon.
She teases Dr Tom – on camera of course – about his lack of digital awareness. “This is the man who calls it Facetube, aren’t you Tom?”
The two have very different approaches but mutual respect. And both realised their job in Gaza was twofold. They had to bear witness. They had to report.
Dr Victoria Rose
Running past huge craters
They had to provide insight into what fellow Palestinian medics are up against in Gaza; how hospitals – protected under international law – are being affected, and how ordinary Gazan civilians are suffering.
So, Dr Tom took us into the heart of the European Gaza Hospital minutes after Israeli forces dropped multiple bombs around the complex.
We saw him racing through the car park outside the Emergency Department and past huge craters and rubble.
He delivered commentary as he ran through the smoke-filled corridors to try to find his anaesthetist. He showed us the repeated bombings a day later – and the scramble to get injured patients out to safety.
The two surgeons may be very different people. But both are highly regarded in their fields and have been brought together by a burning desire to help the wounded and injured in Gaza as well as their fellow medics on the frontline.
They also both entered Gaza with the knowledge that foreign journalists are barred from the territory – and many of those inside have been killed or maimed – so it fell to them, the doctors, to be the witnesses during their stay in Gaza and beyond.
“It’s really not something I’m comfortable with,” Dr Tom said. “For a start, it takes up a lot of time! But it’s important people see what’s going on here.
“The question people should be asking is, why are foreign journalists being barred? What is it the Israelis do not want people to see?”
Analysis: Jonathan Levy – Israel’s block on international journalists in Gaza should not be allowed to stand
Listen to The World with Richard Engel and Yalda Hakim every Wednesday
Dr Victoria texted a lot about her fears that Nasser Hospital, where the two travelling teams finally end up, may face the same fate as the European Gaza – evacuated and now out of action.
“We’ve got to keep on reminding people what’s going on here because Nasser is the last functioning hospital in the south, and if it has to be evacuated, it will have tragic consequences for the civilians here. Hundreds will die,” she says.
The film is a graphic, often painful watch of human endurance, tragedy, pain and survival – told through the eyes of two exceptional and inspiring surgeons who felt their duty as doctors also meant they should lay bare what’s happening inside the Gaza Strip – and what is still happening – while the world’s focus has shifted elsewhere.
Gaza: Doctors On The Frontline will air on Sky News at 9pm on 19 June
Russian President Vladimir Putin has said any foreign troops operating as part of a peacekeeping force in Ukraine would be considered a “legitimate target” by Moscow.
It comes a day after French President Emmanuel Macron said 26 of Ukraine’s allies had formally committed to deploying troops “by land, sea or air” to help guarantee Kyiv’s security the day after any ceasefire or peace is achieved.
Mr Macron stressed any troops would be deployed to prevent “any new major aggression” and not at the frontline, adding the force does “not have the will or the objective of waging war against Russia”.
Mr Putin quickly poured cold water on the proposals when speaking at an economic forum in Russia’s eastern Vladivostok region on Friday.
Directly responding to Mr Macron’s comments, he said: “If any troops appear there, especially now, during military operations, we proceed from the fact that these will be legitimate targets for their destruction.
“And if decisions are reached that lead to peace, to long-term peace, then I simply do not see any sense in their presence on the territory of Ukraine, full stop.”
Russia has long argued that one of its reasons for going to war in Ukraine was to prevent NATO from admitting Kyiv as a member and placing its forces in Ukraine.
Speaking today, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said it was important that security guarantees “start working now, during the war, and not only after it ends”.
On Thursday, NATO chief Mark Rutte said Russia had no veto on Western troops being deployed to Ukraine: “Why are we interested in what Russia thinks about troops in Ukraine? It’s a sovereign country. It’s not for them to decide.”
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Our Moscow correspondent Ivor Bennett reveals the that three things Vladimir Putin’s warning to foreign peacekeeping troops in Ukraine reveals.
‘Please come to Moscow’
Mr Putin also addressed the chances of a direct meeting between himself and Mr Zelesnkyy aimed at ending the war.
Such a proposal looked positive after the Russian met Donald Trump in Alaska last month, but Mr Putin said on Friday he did not see much point in such a meeting because “it will be practically impossible to reach an agreement with the Ukrainian side on key issues”.
However, he reiterated an offer he made earlier this week to host Mr Zelenskyy for talks in Moscow, which Ukraine’s defence minister previously declared as “knowingly unacceptable”.
“I said: ‘I’m ready, please, come, we will definitely provide working conditions and security, a 100% guarantee’,” Mr Putin said.
Russian President Vladimir Putin visits an interactive exhibition in Vladivostok. Pic: Sputnik/Reuters
“But if they tell us: ‘we want to meet with you, but you have to go somewhere else for this meeting’, it seems to me that these are simply excessive requests on us.”
Speaking at a news conference in Paris on Thursday, Mr Zelenskyy said US mediators informed him about Mr Putin’s invitation.
“Our American partners told us that Putin invited me to Moscow, and I believe that if you want to avoid a meeting, you should invite me to Moscow,” he said.
However, he said the fact that the issue of organising a meeting arose was “not bad”.
Drone strikes continue
While talks to end the war continue at a diplomatic level, more heavy drone strikes were recorded across Ukraine.
Kyiv’s air force said Moscow attacked Ukraine overnight with 157 strike and decoy drones, as well as seven missiles of various types.
Air defences shot down or jammed 121 of the drones, it said, but 35 drones and seven missiles still struck 10 locations.
Russian drone attack damages houses in Dnipro. Pic: Reuters
Russian drone attack damages houses in Dnipro. Pic: Reuters
Elsewhere, Russian troops destroyed 92 Ukrainian drones overnight, according to its defence ministry.
Local social media channels in the city of Ryazan, approximately 200 kilometres (125 miles) southeast of Moscow, reported that the city’s Rosneft oil refinery had been targeted. Ryazan’s regional governor said that drone debris had fallen on an “industrial enterprise” but did not give further details.
Ukraine has stepped up attacks on Russian oil infrastructure that it says fuels Moscow’s war effort in recent months.
Military analyst Professor Michael Clarke said Ukraine’s campaign on Russia’s oil refineries has been a successful one so far, but doubts it will hurt Moscow’s war machine too much.
“Will that directly affect the war? Probably not. Because the Russian military runs on diesel,” he said.
“It filters through to the war in the sense that it inconveniences and bothers the Russians and reminds the Russian population that this war has a cost to them as well.”
Hamas has released a video showing two Israeli hostages, one of whom says he is being held in Gaza City, where the IDF has launched a major offensive.
Guy Gilboa-Dalal and Alon Ohel were kidnapped during the October 2023 massacre and are two of 48 captives still believed to be held by Hamas, with 20 thought to still be alive.
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ordered his military to occupy the whole of Gaza, with troops and armour currently assaulting Gaza City, where around a million people lived before the war broke out.
On Friday, the IDF bombed a high-rise building in the city’s west that – without providing evidence – it said was being used by Hamas. The military claimed that civilians were warned beforehand.
Pictures from Gaza City show Palestinians running for safety as the building collapses.
Guy Gilboa-Dalal (right) and Alon Ohel. Pics: Bring Them Home Now
Hostages appear in video released by Hamas
The video was edited and featured an exhausted-looking Mr Gilboa-Dalal speaking for around three-and-a-half minutes.
He appears in a car for some of the video and says that he is being held in Gaza City along with other hostages.
He says that he is afraid of being killed by Israel’s latest assault.
The video is dated 28 August. Sky News could not independently determine the date of recording.
Palestinians inspect the site of an Israeli strike on a tent, outside al Shifa Hospital, in Gaza City. Pic: Reuters
Mr Gilboa-Dalal appears to be in the backseat of a car that is being driven around. At one point, he identifies a passing building as one belonging to the Red Cross.
Hamas has refused to allow the Red Cross to see the hostages.
At one point, Mr Ohel, 24, is also seen.
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Israeli strike hits Gaza displacement camp
Family mark ‘sign of life’
In a statement, Mr Gilboa-Dalal’s family said: “We have received a sign of life from our Guy after six months since the previous video in which he was seen with Evyatar David watching their friends being released.
“Guy, Alon, and other hostages were transferred to Gaza, and we are deeply concerned for their lives. They must be brought home.”
But talks between Israel and Hamas via mediators – aimed at stopping the fighting and freeing the hostages – collapsed in July.
After the release of the video, Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid urged Israeli negotiators to resume talks on a deal to free the hostages.
Read more:
Anger over Israeli president’s visit to UK
A diary of daily life in Gaza
Smoke rises as a building hit by an Israeli air strike collapses in Gaza City. Pic: Reuters
Strike on high-rise building
The release of the hostage video comes as the Israeli military continues its attack on Gaza City, where residents say it bombed a high-rise tower on Friday.
The building’s management said it was being used for displaced people and denied it had been used for anything other than civilian purposes.
Footage of the strike showed the building collapsing and sending thick clouds of smoke billowing over nearby tent camps.
Father-of-two Ismail, from the city’s Sheikh Radwan neighbourhood, told Reuters that his family feared they would not be able to return if they fled.
“We pray for a ceasefire,” he said.
More than 64,000 Palestinians have been killed in the Gaza Strip since the war began, Gaza health authorities say.
The war was sparked by Hamas’ attack on Israel, when militants killed 1,200 people and took around 250 hostages.
Fifteen people have been killed in Sri Lanka after a passenger bus veered off a 1,000ft cliff.
A further 16 people have been injured, including five children, a police spokesman said.
The crash took place on a mountain road near the town of Wellawaya, around 280km east of the capital Colombo, on Thursday night.
The spokesman said an initial police investigation has revealed the bus was travelling at a high speed when its driver lost control.
A map showing the town of Wellawaya, in Sri Lanka, where the bus crashed
He added that the bus crashed into another vehicle and the road’s guardrails, before toppling off the cliff.
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Local television footage showed the severely damaged bus lying at the bottom of the precipice as rescue crews – including soldiers, police officers and volunteers – removed the injured people throughout the night.
Deadly bus accidents are common in Sri Lanka, especially in the island nation’s mountainous regions, often due to poorly maintained and narrow roads, and reckless driving.
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