Interviewer: As we were saying, you’ve just returned, you are working at the Nasser Hospital in Han Unas. Can you speak to what you saw there and what shocked you the most?
Dr. Victoria Rose: I think what shocked me the most this time was the number of children that I saw and in fact operated on. When I’d been at the European Gaza Hospital in March, it was a lot of children then but now in August I would say that 80% of everyone I treated was under the age of 16.
Interviewer: What sort of injuries would you see and what sort of operations would you be carrying out?
Dr. Victoria Rose: All of the injuries were explosive related and burns. There was no real other injury apart from explosion or a burn. So the sorts of things that I was mainly treating were sort of third degree burns 30, 40%. I saw a lot of lower limb trauma, children losing legs, losing arms. We had a couple of upper arm amputees. A lot of facial injuries. I had a seven-year-old that had most of his nose blown off and a big hole in his lip. A girl that had lost quite a lot of her skin down to the bone on her forehead. So what tended to happen is in the explosions the children would either get burnt, or shrapnel, or part of the building that had crumbled would be weaponized and held at them and inflict a sort of soft tissue wound with or without an underlying bony injury.
Interviewer: Have you ever seen anything like this?
Dr. Victoria Rose: No, never.a