Reporter 1: The climate activist, as we’ve been reporting this morning, Greta Thunberg, claims that she and her crewmates had been kidnapped from a humanitarian ship that was bound for Gaza. The Israeli military confirmed that the British flag boat was safely now making its way to the shores of Israel, calling it a selfie yacht of celebrities.

Reporter 1: the activists on board had planned to reach Gaza’s territorial waters in order to deliver aid. Well, British doctor Victoria Rose says children in Gaza desperately need help, and she has just returned to the UK after her third trip to Gaza since October the 7th, treating former patients, and joins us now. So, you can give us an insight into actually what is happening. Obviously, Greta Thunberg was attempting to deliver aid. That’s all been stopped now. It looks like she’s going to be returned to Sweden. But if we took a look into the hospital where you were operating on children, Dr. Victoria Rose, what would we see?

Dr. Rose: It’s incredibly busy there at the moment. I was at Nasser Hospital, which is in Khan Yunis in the south of Gaza. It’s the only standing hospital now in the south of Gaza. The European Gaza Hospital was bombed on the day that we arrived, and the only other facilities are field hospitals. There’s five field hospitals around, but they’re all tent facilities. None of them have got ICU capability, and none of them have got any real operating capacity. So Nasser has two adult ICUs, both with 12 beds each and a nine-bedded pediatric ICU, as well as overflow. It has its own oxygen station, its own generator, and if anything happens to Nasser, there is nowhere that has the capacity it has, and nowhere that could take the ICU patients.

Reporter 1: You say that this is your third trip since the war began, since October the 7th. Would you say that things are getting worse and worse and worse?

Dr. Rose: Definitely. I think the level of structural damage was the worst in August, and obviously most of the area has been reduced to rubble, so there’s not much more to bomb, but the state of the population was appalling this time. Not only the malnutrition, but I think the morale, that good old-fashioned Palestinian resilience is running out. Lots of my colleagues were saying to me that they would rather die than carry on this war. Just things that we haven’t heard from them before.

Reporter 1: What’s the worst that you’ve seen there?

Dr. Rose: I think the worst I’ve seen is small children not only being bombed, and losing limbs, but also to find out that that child that’s missing their knee is the only surviving child from their family and they’re now orphaned as well as disabled.

Reporter 2: and what about the, because obviously you’re seeing horrific injuries, but what are you seeing in terms of just day-to-day living for the children there?

Dr. Rose: it’s a really awful situation now, most of them have been displaced about 15 times and there doesn’t seem to be anywhere safe, everyone’s living in tents, there’s no sanitation, you’re running out of clean water and there’s been no substantial aid into the country since the 2nd of March, so everyone has lost weight, there’s a lot of muscle wasting, fat loss, everyone looks five to ten kilos lighter than when I last saw them. It’s a real dire situation now.

Reporter 1: You’ve basically seen with your own eyes what journalists are being denied the sight of. Because no journalists are allowed into Gaza. So you’re a witness to stuff which journalists would be reporting on, and you will know that Israel has bombed hospitals and destroyed some hospitals, and they say they’ve done it because Hamas is hiding there and is operating from hospitals. Did you see any evidence of that when you were in the hospital that you’ve been working?

Dr. Rose: No, and I’ve never seen it in any of the hospitals that I’ve been in. I didn’t treat or see anyone in any form of military uniform and I didn’t see anyone with any weapons apart from the IDF.

Reporter 2: The hospital that you had planned to go to of course as you mentioned, was European Gaza Hospital. The reason that you couldn’t get there was because on the day that you arrived, that had been targeted by Israel, and in fact, the Daily Telegraph’s Jerusalem correspondent was one correspondent who was allowed into Gaza by Israel. Because the military, he says, brought us here to the Gaza European Hospital in an effort to show that the attack on that hospital was a precision strike in order to target and eliminate Mohamed Sinwa, the leader of Hamas, who was said to have been killed eight meters below Gaza’s European Hospital in the west of Khan Yunis. Are you worried that hospitals are going to become targets because Israel says Hamas is underneath?

Dr. Rose: I think they already have. Nasser at the moment is in the active fighting zone so you can only get into and out of it if you have a de-confliction on your journey.

Reporter 2: What’s a deconfliction?

Dr. Rose: You have to contact the IDF, let them know what you’re doing, where you’re travelling to, the time that you’re going and they will give you a green light to go. They haven’t given any green lights to the staff buses into and out of Narsa since it went into the red zone, so effectively staff are not able to get in, patients are not able to get out. And as time goes on the hospital will slowly be strangulated. It won’t be long before the generator gets hit or the water system gets hit. It’s in an active fighting zone and as I said that is the last hospital standing in the south of Gaza. So we’re really running out of time.

Reporter 1: What is your impression of the feelings of the ordinary Palestinian people in Gaza, as to the future because it’s been said many times now that the suffering is so intense in the civilian population that a whole generation is now being bred who will want to take revenge for what’s happening now. Did you get a sense of that?

Dr. Rose: The people that we spoke to are really, as I said, at the lowest that they’ve been and they’re very despondent. Most of them would rather die than carry on, but there’s a real feeling that they don’t want to be driven out of their country. I think the footage, I saw some footage of one of the children who’d lost his mother at the GHF shooting, and you can see how angry this child is, and at the moment, there’s 42,000 orphans in Gaza. And I think that there will be a problem going forward.

Reporter 2: Will you be going back?

Dr. Rose: I don’t know whether they’ll let me back in. If they let me back in, I’m going back.

Reporter 1: Why wouldn’t they let you back in?

Dr. Rose: COGAT have the final say. So that’s the Coordination of Activities in the Palestinian Territories. It’s a branch of the IDF. They get the final say as to who enters and who doesn’t. They’ve been denying access to 50% of the doctors that have been applying to go in with the United Nations.

Reporter 1: You are obviously taking a huge personal risk. You could be at work when the bomb drops.

Dr. Rose: It’s a very difficult situation because we’ve been before and we know what a difference we make in terms of just even standing with our Palestinian colleagues. But again, as you said, bearing witness. But we are making a difference one case at a time. So you feel a huge responsibility to go back and do something.