A Game of Target Practice’: Doctors Back From Gaza Share Harrowing Stories of Israel’s Brutality in Exclusive Town Hall

Welcome to Zeteo Town Hall. I am Mahdi Hasan here in Washington DC and I am joined today by two very important guests. You all know what is happening in Gaza, but we only know what is happening in Gaza through the Palestinian journalists who have been giving their lives to report But they are constantly being defamed and smeared by supporters of Israel in the West. But we also know what is going on through brave Western doctors who have gone out to volunteer in Gaza from across the world, but especially from places like the UK, US, Canada and Australia.
Today we are joined by two doctors who have just returned from Gaza, from Nasser Hospital, and have seen the starvation and famine firsthand, have seen the violence firsthand, have seen the victims of the “GHF aid sites”. Dr. Ambereen Sleemi is a urogynecologist. She is the co-founder and surgical director of International Medical Response. Dr. Nick Maynard is a British doctor, consultant surgeon at Oxford University Hospitals. Thank you both for joining us today
Nick, I’m going to start with you, because I believe you have been going to Gaza for 15 years. This was not your first rodeo (if I may say so), your first genocide. You have covered many conflicts in 2014, 2012, the fallout in 2009, all of those Israeli assaults that pale in comparison to this one. But I want to get it from you, as someone who has seen Gaza before, who has seen it suffer in the past, how was it worse this time? How was it different? How was it shocking?

Nick: It was unbelievably worse. I’ve been to Gaza many, many times, as you say. Each time I go I think that I’m going to be ready for what I’m going to see and that particularly applies for the last 3 trips I went on since October 2023. Each time I go I think I’m going to be ready. I know Gaza well; I’ve been speaking to colleagues and friends. But each time I go there it gets much worse. On this occasion, much, much more so. I really thought I’d be ready, because I’ve had 2 trips out there in the last year. I’ve seen terrible things out there, but this time it was much worse. Actually, I don’t think anyone could be prepared for the things you see in Gaza now.

Mahdi: Well, we’re going to talk about that. Sadly, we have to talk about it, we have to document this so that people know what’s going on. There is so much information and disinformation. To those who are joining us, thank you for coming today. There are already almost 150 in the chat and the numbers are going up. ………(irrelevant). Ambereen, let me ask you. I believe that this is your first trip to Gaza. What was it like for you the first day, the first hour, the first moment you stepped into Nasser Hospital?

Ambereen: Yes, thank you for having me. It was my first time and I have spent the last 20 years of my career working in either conflict zones, inter-conflict zones, ceasefire zones or post- conflict zones and I had been following the news, following the medical condition on the ground in Gaza, since the beginning of the genocide, but I was really not prepared for what I saw. My first hours in Nasser were shocking, to say the least, and I was completely unprepared for the conditions on the ground, the conditions of the patients we saw, the conditions of the healthcare workers we were working with and also just the Nasser Hospital as a facility. As we know, a year and a half ago it was invaded by the Israeli military and ransacked. So, I knew a little bit about the history, but there were tell-tale signs of it all over the hospital – gunshot wounds on the walls, inside and outside, markings made, electronic equipment that had been destroyed completely. So, that was within the first few hours of me going in.

Mahdi: When we talk about hunger in Gaza, the story for the first year, year and a half, was about killing, the sheer number of people killed by Israeli bombs and shooting. The story in recent weeks that has finally penetrated the media, political consciousness of the media in the West is starvation, hunger. It has finally forced political leaders, maybe not the American leader, at least European leaders to say: “This is wrong, this has to stop!” When we talk about starvation and hunger and malnutrition and malnourishment, Ambereen, you mention the staff. Nick, you speak about the people you treated and we’ll come back to that. Ambereen, what about the people you’re working with – the doctors, the nurses the staff that are still alive? What is their situation? I’m assuming that they themselves are struggling with the lack of food.

Ambereen: Yes of course, the lack of food was obvious. The month I was there it steadily got worse. We saw it in our patients, we saw it in the staff, everyone from the doctors, the heads of departments to the nurses. I also spent a lot of time in the maternity hospital and also the evenings in the general operating rooms. You could tell between the dehydration, the malnourishment and the starvation, how it was affecting our staff in the energy levels and in the pictures, they showed us how they looked a year earlier to what they looked like then. There was this visible loss of weight, an overall fatigue and people even talked about how hungry they were every morning. It was a conversation everyone was having. It was incredible prevalent among our staff and obviously also among our patients.

Mahdi: We are hearing in the pro-Israeli parts of the media that this is all a fiction; this is all propaganda. Nick, talk to me about what you saw, about people who died from malnutrition and starvation and those who had no pre-existing condition who were suffering from malnutrition and starvation.

Nick: It was terrible. We saw malnutrition a year ago. I don’t know why it has taken so long for it to come out. It’s certainly worse now and it was appalling a year ago. I had patients dying from malnutrition a year ago, but this time it was even worse than I could have imagined. They were coming in profoundly malnourished, very, very thin. When they are malnourished, their immune system is suppressed, their wounds don’t heal, their tissues don’t repair. They come in with terrible injuries. I was operating every day on major abdominal injuries, major thoracic injuries, dealing either with terrible shrapnel injuries from the fragmentation bombs, minute pieces of shrapnel that tear through the internal organs, or very bad gunshot wounds. The internal damage is horrific. We operate to repair all these internal tissues, but because they are so malnourished, the tissues don’t heal and many of the repaired tissues break down and they get leakages of various bodily fluids into the abdomen and they get terrible infections. Not only are they terribly malnourished when they come in and they get all these complications, we have no nutrition to give them in the hospital. In the adults, we had no nutrition to give them and if their families couldn’t bring them any, they didn’t get any nutrition. And many of these people can’t eat, so you need to give them liquid nutrition and that for the adults simply was not there. So, they got more and more malnourished and consequently many of them died. So many of them were preventable deaths. It was really very distressing to see.

Mahdi: Ambereen, a question from ?: How did you take care of your own physical needs, whilst in Gaza?

Ambereen:
Well, I feel that we were committed to helping our colleagues do the best job they could. We lived in the hospital and so, while hospitals are not 100% safe, nowhere is safe in Gaza, our colleagues had to leave and go to their tents on public buses, because no one has fuel for cars, and if you had a car, likely it was bombed or destroyed in some fashion. So, for us at least, we had a place where we all lived together in the hospital complex. How safe was that? Nowhere is a 100% safe, but compared to our health care colleagues and our patients, who had to leave by buses everyday through a safe route and then go to find food for their families, that was really the main issue that we were contending with.

Mahdi: Did you encounter Israeli soldiers at the checkpoints when you entered Gaza?
Ambereen: That was my first time crossing the checkpoint. It was very tense and very stressful. The exchange of vehicles, going from convoy to armored vehicle, once you are inside Gaza. I’ve only experienced that one time before, when I was in Sudan, but this time it was with armed guards with machine guns pointed at us as we took our luggage across the parking lot. You start in this incredibly tense situation and then you are taken by armed convoys to the UN headquarters, where you are picked up by your host in Gaza, who will take you to for the night to a safe small guesthouse before you get to the hospital. It was all very tense; everybody is a little on edge in Gaza. You really hear the constant drones that everybody has talked about, 24/7, and then gun shots from quodcopters. Outside the hospital, when I got there, it was declared a red zone. There were tanks on the streets just right outside and there was also bombing and shooting outside the hospital grounds, very close to the hospital 24/7, for the first very tense days when I got there.

Mahdi: Nick, I’ve heard Israeli military propagandists on the social media say “It’s all a lie that we are blocking things. They have everything they need”. I’ve seen people deny that infants’ formula was banned from going into Gaza. You were there in Gaza. I think that I’ve heard you say that things were stopped. Explain to people what was stopped when you went in.

Nick: We all had our luggage searched. We were given pretty strict instructions not to take anything they were likely to confiscate from us. Colleagues of mine brought in babies’ formula, about a week after I got there, that we had asked for because babies were literally dying. There were 4 newborns died the week before we got there, because there was no formula feed. Some American doctors whom I know, came in 3 days after me and brought in formula feed in their luggage and they all had formula feed removed from their luggage by Israeli border guards and taken away, very specifically, nothing else. That’s all they taken out of their luggage. Every single container of formula feed was taken away and ….

Mahdi: Have you ever experienced anything like that in your travels around the world?

Nick: No, and that’s why I say that every time I go there it’s indescribably worse and there are things one could not imagine happening at the moment in Gaza. That’s why you can’t be prepared for it. We had babies, little babies lined up ….. I remember very well a little girl, 7 months old, looking like a newborn. She was being fed with 10% dextrose when I first visited the pediatric intensive care. That is sugar water, no food, and she died 2 weeks into our trip there. There are many stories that both Ambereen and I talk about. This notion that Israel is denying, we witnessed Israelis taking this out of the luggage. So there is no question that they are the ones responsible for stopping the food from getting in there.

Mahdi: No question indeed. Ambereen, last week Medical Aid for Palestine announced that more than half of the pregnant and breastfeeding women are suffering from malnutrition. You worked at the maternity ward. What is the impact of that on women and children? I know the UN’s special rapporteur has come out recently and said that there is a femi-genocide in Gaza, specifically targeting women and children. Talk about that.

Ambereen: I did spend my mornings and most of my time in the maternity hospital, taking care of pregnant women who came in. We could clearly see they were malnourished. Pregnancy is a time when nourishment for fetal development is vital. Not only do you have to have a healthy mum, taking the nutrients that are necessary to have babies that will thrive and to prevent defects, there are very specific vitamins that we give. Everywhere in the world, women are instructed to take vitamins, specifically to maintain a healthy pregnancy, to give birth to a healthy baby. What we saw was malnourished women who came in. Malnourished women give birth to malnourished babies. The rate of miscarriages and abortions at that point was up 300%, the rate of birth defects had increased markedly. Part of that is malnutrition and part is the constant bombing and the munition that are in the air, in the soil, in the sea, the heavy metals and the toxins that are taken in during embryogenesis, so that could be one of the reasons. Pre-termed birth is a consequence of both stress and malnutrition, and we saw both. So the overall, holistic picture from a maternity point of view was vey, very grim and that translates to absolutely terrible consequences for babies who are born full term that don’t look full term, and for babies born pre-term who can’t get the necessary nutrients. As for femi-genocide – this was from the UN rapporteur on women and girls and 67% of fatalities that are documented in Gaza are women and children.

Mahdi: A horrific number. Apparently, they are all Hamas. That is what we are told. Let me ask you this, Nick. You described a quadcopter attacking breastfeeding women. Can you talk a little more about that?

Nick: I didn’t see that. I operated on the women who were attacked. One of the most outstanding things about this trip – I’ve seen quadcopter wounds before, but they were in the minority. This time we saw lots of gunshots on teenage boys who were shot at the Gaza Humanitarian Fund food sites. But there was also quadcopter shooting on the tents nearby. I had 2 ladies who came in, who had been shot by quadcopter, they had been in a tent. One had been breastfeeding her 7- month-old baby; the other was pregnant, just resting. The quadcopters, who did this frequently, were indiscriminately firing rounds at all the tents, trying to kill whoever was in them. These ladies were brought into the hospital and I operated on both of them. The pregnant lady had terrible damage in her bowel. Miraculously, the uterus was not and the baby was fine. I had to remove quite a lot of her bowel. The other lady, who was breastfeeding, was also injured in her bowel. These were quadcopters that were firing indiscriminately at the tents, where there would be almost exclusively women and children.

Mahdi: So, in a sense it was not indiscriminate. It was discriminate They knew what they were doing. You also mentioned what you believed it was something like target practicing, a pattern of shooting at specific body parts. Explain what you mean by that.

Nick: I think it was the third or the fourth day after I arrived and a young 12-year-old came in who had been shot at one of the GHF food distribution points and he died. He had been shot in his aorta and we couldn’t save his life and we had another 2 or 3 abdominal wounds that came in on the same day. I was talking to a close friend of mine, who is a Gazan ER doctor and I have met him on several trips, and he said that they had noticed a very strong pattern over the preceding weeks and we then noticed a very striking pattern over the next 2-3 weeks, whereby there were clusters of particular body parts being injured on particular days. These were all young teenage boys, ranging from 11 to 16. One day they would come in with gun wounds predominantly in the neck or the head. Clearly, most of them died. The next day there would be gun-shot wounds to the chest; the next day it would be to the abdomen; the next day the legs or the arm and one day, it was at the end of my third week, on the Saturday evening, four young teenage boys 13-14 came in, all shot in their testicles. This clustering of injuries was so striking, the numbers were so great, it was inconceivable that it could have been coincidence. It appeared to us like a game of target practice was being played.