'I am a surgeon in Gaza – food aid points are designed to be death traps'
Siobhan McNally is a Senior Features Writer for the Mirror and Sunday Mirror – in print and online. Previously she was a columnist and edited the Community Column at the Mirror. Now back in London after 25 years in Winchester – complete with travelling circus of two cats, one ancient pug and a grumpy teenager – Siobhan specialises in general interest national stories, nostalgia, history and music. Also has a passion for quirky, fun foodie ideas and a sudden age-related interest in gardening. Get in touch with ideas and stories to siobhan.mcnally@mirror.co.uk
Professor Nick Maynard, consultant gastrointestinal surgeon at Oxford University Hospital
I've been operating on trauma injuries in Nasser Hospital, Khan Younis, for the last four weeks. My health care colleagues from Gaza have described the aid points as death traps designed to create chaos and incite rioting.
This is my third trip to Gaza since October 7 – and although many things are similar in terms of air strikes, what is different is the rise in the number of shootings at the food distribution points. We're several km away from the aid sites – we're the nearest hospital and all the people come to us.
Food is kept in a compound which is locked, and they wait until hundreds of aid seekers have collected and then open up a very narrow gate, and then there's just complete chaos and everyone fighting for food. An anaesthetist colleague of mine from Gaza rushed down to the food site in between operations to get food for his family, came back covered in cuts and bruises because of the rioting.
All of our surgeons have seen a pattern of injuries among predominantly – but not exclusively – young teenage males who are sent by their starving families to get food.
They seem to be targeting different body parts on different days. Some days they come in with gunshot wounds to the head or the neck, the next day the chest, the next, the abdomen.
Nine days ago we saw four small, four young teenagers who had all been shot in the testicles at the same time.
I have seen all abdominal and chest injuries – that's what I operate on – and terrible injuries to the pancreas, duodenum, bowel, you name it. So the pattern is a very clear pattern of targeting and it's almost like they're playing a game.
I'm getting identical descriptions from people of Israeli soldiers just shooting indiscriminately at people, I've been told they're using artificial intelligence, and remotely controlled hovering quadcopters with four rotors and cameras and guns attached.
A friend of mine who's a theatre nurse at Nasser Hospital was shot last year when a quadcopter came into the operating theatre and shot him in the chest.
As well as the teenage boys, I've seen women in tents near the food distribution centre and they describe quadcopters firing indiscriminately at all the tents. One woman was three months pregnant and another was breastfeeding her three-month-old baby at the time.
It is inconceivable to me that these are collateral damage. This is deliberate targeting and what all of us have witnessed.
This is not a famine. It is mass extermination
Omar Abdel-Mannan, founder of Health Workers 4 Palestine
As we speak, Gaza is being deliberately starved. Today, ambulances across the Strip turned on their sirens in unison – a collective cry for help from a population pushed to the brink.
The majority of the territory is now classified as Category 5: the most severe level of food insecurity. Even if aid were allowed in today, many would still die. This is not a famine. It is mass extermination.
What's happening in Gaza is not just enabled by Israel – it is facilitated by its allies. And the UK is complicit. It continues to supply Israel with components for F-35 fighter jets – the very aircraft used to flatten homes, hospitals, and refugee camps. British-made parts are helping to slaughter civilians. This is not neutrality; it's active participation. History will judge this moment. And those in power – including Keir Starmer – will not be absolved. They will be remembered as enablers of war crimes.
Inside Gaza, doctors are being assassinated, detained, tortured – over 1,500 killed to date and over 400 detained illegally. This is a systematic erasure of a healthcare system – the murder of those who save lives. Meanwhile, in the UK, medics who speak out face career-threatening smear campaigns and regulatory complaints driven by pro-Israel lobby groups. NHS England has already confirmed that antisemitism is covered under the Equality Act, yet the Health Secretary is now interfering with the independence of the regulator to appease political allies.
We must end this complicity. We must fight for a future where Palestinian health workers – those who have risked everything – are not only protected, but empowered to lead the rebuilding of their shattered health system. That means Palestinian-led healthcare. That means sovereignty, dignity, and justice.
• Voices of Solidarity, which took place on Saturday 19 July, was the UK's largest cultural fundraiser for Palestine, raising money for the Health Workers 4 Palestine (HW4P) Solidarity Fund. Proceeds go towards life-saving healthcare on the ground and supporting health workers under siege – www.healthworkers4palestine.com/donate
The waste of human lives is sickening
Laura Janner-Klausner, former senior rabbi to Reform Judaism and rabbi of Bromley Reform Synagogue
We need world leaders to step in and help us get out of this sickening situation. The Israeli government, Hamas, Islamic Jihad – who are also holding hostages – should be applying pressure to stop immediately what they are doing, to ensure there is safe and sufficient humanitarian aid, including food and medicine, getting directly to the Gazans who desperately need it.
Release all the hostages, stop the attacks – on both sides. That's for the short term. In the medium term, we need an honourable, quick divorce so there is an end of war, not just a shaky ceasefire. And in the long term, we need to live together: two peoples. Separation has not helped us in the past, and we need responsible adults back in the room who can set aside their hatred for each other and work together to stop the senseless violence.
The vast majority of British Jews are absolutely distraught about what is happening in Gaza. The waste of human lives is sickening. An Israeli child and a Palestinian child are the same. Sick and injured people need full medical care wherever they live. Food is food, and people are starving.
Both sides are dehumanising each other, but they need to find a way to live together.
International community has failed to deliver
Tufail Hussain, director of Islamic Relief UK Today's latest atrocities in Gaza are beyond cruel. Desperate, starving people should never be targeted, yet the Israeli military continues to do so. It is heartbreaking to see people who want to feed themselves and their families being heartlessly murdered. This is a man-made catastrophe that the international community could have put a stop to by now.
This latest barbarity will once again be condemned, but without political action to demand a ceasefire, lift the siege of Gaza and force Israel to let international aid in, then these condemnations are hollow. For almost two years, aid agencies and human rights groups have been demanding a ceasefire, which the international community has failed to deliver.
They must now finally take action to prevent the future horrors that will be inflicted upon the Palestinian people.
They are kettling desperate, starving people
Brian Brivtai, CEO of the Britain Palestine Project
The whole Israeli campaign in Gaza is entirely disproportionate to any kind of self defence. The purposeful targeting of civilians, and the starvation of a population, are crimes against humanity. Recent developments are incredibly disturbing.
First, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation aid operation, which concentrates people in smaller and smaller areas, has basically created shooting galleries. They are kettling people who are desperate and starving, who see food and try and get it, and who then are being shot dead.
But Israel's plan for a 'humanitarian city' is the most terrifying development of all. If you concentrate 2 million people in a single, tiny location, and deny them the means to life because you've destroyed their hospitals and reduced the amount of food you're giving them, then you are intentionally committing genocidal acts.
Israel wants to reduce the Palestinian part of Gaza to an absolutely minimum geographical area, and they are going to flatten the rest of it, then annex it. We laughed at Trump's suggestion of the Gaza Riviera, but I think that's what we are going to see happen.
All the British government needs to do is obey international law, not more than that. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has deemed it plausible that Israel is creating a plausible case for genocide, and it's our responsibility under that amendment to prevent it.
Not to wait until Israel has killed 200,000, 300,000 Palestinians, but to act to prevent it now.
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