First come the bombs. A boom, then 2,000lb worth of destructive force flattening everything in its way. Severing limbs, vaporizing bodies, leaving craters full of blood and rubble where children used to play.
Then come the drones. As the dust settles, the drones start to swarm, picking off any survivors. Armed quadcopters; ingeniously engineered killing machines hunting for human prey. The drones, many of which seem to be autonomous, shoot everything that moves. Even if it’s a helpless child, the drone will sometimes shoot: firing lethal bullets into a soft skull. A scene straight out of a dystopian sci-fi movie set on some desolate dust-covered planet. Except it’s not sci-fi; it’s reality. It’s happening right now in Gaza.
Bombs then drones. Bombs then drones. This was the pattern described time and time again by patients to Dr Nizam Mamode, a retired British surgeon who recently came back from working at the ravaged Nasser hospital in Gaza. Mamode, who went to Gaza with Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP), has worked in many war zones throughout his career. He’s been in Lebanon, Rwanda during the genocide, Sudan, Nicaragua. But, during a recent phone call, he told me what numerous other doctors have told numerous other media outlets: he’s never seen anything like Gaza.
The scale of civilian injuries, Mamode told me, was unprecedented. “Pretty much every day we’d have one or two mass casualty incidents and there would be 10-20 dead, 20-40 seriously injured … the majority of those were women and children, perhaps 60 to 70%.” These were mainly people, I want to stress, who were in areas that Israel had deemed safe. “The so-called humanitarian zone – I can’t even bring myself to call it the safe zone,” Mamode says. “So that green zone, you’ve got about a million, million and a half people crammed into that area. Many of them are in so-called tents. The tents are often just bits of plastic stuck on poles.”
What Dr Mamode is saying is not new; there have been a lot of harrowing accounts from doctors who have come back from Gaza. In April, for example, the Guardian published a report based on testimony from nine doctors, all but one of them foreign volunteers, along with eyewitness accounts which “appear to back up claims that Israeli soldiers have fired on civilians”.
Still, while there are plenty of these accounts out there, I called Mamode because some of the quotes I have read – stories of kids “shot perfectly in the temple” – are so disturbing that I just needed to hear them first-hand. I needed to ensure there wasn’t some mysterious nuance I was missing.
I also needed to understand why these stories don’t seem to be making any difference. What these doctors are saying should stop every normal human being in their tracks. They should keep you up at night; make you want to drop everything you are doing in order to stop the mass extermination that is unfolding in Gaza. And yet, testimony from scores of international doctors, some of which has been addressed directly to the Biden administration, seems to fall on deaf ears. The unconditional aid to Israel keeps flowing. Excuses for Israel’s genocidal violence keep coming. It’s self-defence, we are told. Israel has a right to self-defence.
Tell me: is this self-defence? One day, Mamode had to operate on a seven-year-old boy who was able to give a description of what happened to him. “He was knocked over by the blast from a bomb and was lying on the floor, heard this noise, looked up, there was a drone, and the drone fired at him. It caused severe injury to his chest and abdomen, his liver and spleen were damaged, his bowel was damaged and part of his stomach was hanging out of his chest. We heard descriptions like this over and over again. So it’s not just one maverick drone operator who may have gone a bit crazy. This was persistent.”
Bombs and drones aren’t the only killing machines in Gaza. There’s also disease and starvation: both caused by the cramped and unsanitary conditions along with Israel blocking medical supplies and food from entering the strip.
“[Israel] expressly forbade us from taking in anything that wasn’t for our personal use, even though we could easily have carried in medicines and equipment,” Mamode says. “And that’s a change because people who’d been with MAP earlier in the year had been able to take in some external fixators to treat fractures. Now they’re severely restricting medical supplies. When you cross into Gaza from Kerem Shalom, you see the tarmac covered for a long way – a kilometer probably – with supplies just lying on the tarmac. Even things like soap and shampoo are not allowed.”
Has Mamode ever seen anything like this, I ask again? He has worked in multiple conflict areas. Has he ever seen these kinds of restrictions?
“Never,” he says. “I have never seen medical supplies being restricted in this way. I’ve never seen people not being allowed to leave so that they’re crammed into this tiny space and they can’t get out. I’ve never seen persistent targeting of civilians, and I’ve never seen such persistent, deliberate targeting of aid workers, including healthcare workers.”
I want to be very clear here: aid workers do not operate haphazardly in Gaza – or anywhere else for that matter. They agree on their routes with the IDF. The leader of aid convoys is in close radio contact with the IDF. They get clearance to proceed. They share maps. They get the IDF to agree that they will not bomb certain safe houses. They take every possible precaution.
And yet, they still get shot at. While Mamode was in Gaza one of the ambulances from his hospital went to the site of a bombing and received four shots in the windscreen. “The fact that that convoy was shot at by the IDF is simply, in my view, to say to aid workers: ‘Think twice about coming here,’” he tells me. “I’ve never seen that. Certainly aid workers and healthcare staff in other conflicts sometimes get injured and or killed inadvertently. But I think in this conflict, they’ve been deliberately targeted. And that’s shocking.”
There is this famous quote attributed to the journalism professor Jonathan Foster that regularly does the rounds on social media: “If someone says it’s raining, and another person says it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both. Your job is to look out the fucking window and find out which is true.”
The problem with Gaza is that it is not easy to look out of the window because it has been barricaded shut. Foreign journalists are not allowed in Gaza unless they are on IDF propaganda trips. Meanwhile Israel has been killing Palestinians reporting on the ground.
“The Israeli army’s elimination of journalists in Gaza – over 130 killed in less than a year – threatens to create a complete media blackout in the blockaded enclave,” Thibaut Bruttin the director general of Reporters Without Borders has said. “These attacks target not only the Palestinian press, but the international public’s right to information that is reliable, free, independent, and pluralist from one of the most closely watched conflict zones on the planet.”
Reports from doctors like Nizam Mamode are the closest thing that we have to reliable and independent information about what is happening in Gaza. They’re the closest thing we have to looking out of the window. And all of these doctors, all these people looking out of the window, are saying exactly the same thing: what is happening in Gaza cannot possibly be described as a normal war.
I spoke to Mamode for 40 minutes and this column only really scratches the surface of what he told me. I had nightmares for days after talking to him. And I’m sure he has nightmares too. It is easy for me to quote him, but it is harder for me to convey just how traumatized he sounded when we spoke.
Still, I know there will be people reading this who will argue that this is all an elaborate lie; who will simply refuse to believe their taxpayer money is funding this carnage. The New York Times recently received a massive backlash for publishing an opinion essay which, in the Times’s words: “Gathered first-hand testimonies from 65 US-based health professionals who worked in Gaza over the past year, who shared more than 160 photographs and videos with Times Opinion to corroborate their detailed accounts of treating preteen children who were shot in the head or chest.”
Even with all this evidence the Times got complaints from people saying that all the foreign doctors coming back from Gaza, reporting the same things, are lying. And those same people and pressure groups will similarly write to my editor calling me a liar. They will accuse me of wanting to make the extremist Israeli government, full of far-right politicians who salivate about genocide, look bad. They will say Hamas is responsible for all this. The IDF, they will say, is just acting in self-defence.
Let me tell you: I would love for nothing more than all of this to be a lie. Because the truth is a hell of a lot harder to swallow: Palestinians are being systematically exterminated with our taxpayer money and our politicians are doing absolutely nothing to stop it.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian US columnist
