A British doctor volunteering in Gaza says she witnessed dozens of Palestinians arriving dead or seriously wounded after a mass shooting near an aid distribution site. The "volume and intensity" of injuries was unlike anything she had seen in her 30-year medical career, Victoria Rose, a 53-year-old senior plastic surgeon from London's Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, said.
She was nearing the end of a 21-day volunteer mission in Gaza on June 1 when she heard about a mass shooting near an aid site. She rushed to Nasser Hospital, the last major functioning hospital in southern Gaza, where she was based.
"There were ambulances coming in, just bringing dead people, and then there were donkey-drawn carts bringing dead people," Ms Rose said in an interview from London. "By about 10 o'clock, we had 20 or so dead bodies, and then easily a hundred or so gunshot wounds," she told The NYT.
Ms Rose travelled to Gaza with the British charity Ideals, which sends medical professionals to crisis zones. She has volunteered in Gaza three times over the past 14 months and said the number and severity of injuries have only worsened.
"They weren't shrapnel wounds anymore, bits of them had been blown off," she said. "Children were coming in with knees missing and feet missing and hands missing."
According to the Gaza Health Ministry, since June 1, more than 700 Palestinians have been killed and around 5,000 injured, near food distribution sites. The shootings occurred under a new aid mechanism led by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a programme backed by American contractors and coordinated with Israeli forces.
The International Committee of the Red Cross, which operates a field hospital in Rafah, said it had treated more than 2,200 weapon-wounded patients in that period and recorded 200 deaths. "The scale and frequency of these incidents are without precedent," the organisation said.
Israel and GHF have rejected the casualty numbers reported by the Gaza Health Ministry but have not released alternative figures. GHF said in a statement it "rejects that an incident took place at or in the immediate vicinity of a GHF distribution site" on June 1 and denied that any fatalities or injuries had occurred during its operations.
Ms Rose said all of the patients she treated on June 1 told her they had been shot by guards near the distribution point. Some said they were fleeing when shot. Their wounds, mostly bullet injuries to the legs, torsos, and abdomens, were consistent with their accounts, she said.
"We're in that point where people have been reduced to such a level of deprivation that they're prepared to die for a bagful of rice and a bit of pasta," she said.
Dr Rose specialises in breast reconstruction and trauma care but said nothing in her 30-year career prepared her for the scale of suffering in Gaza. In May, she treated a three-month-old baby with severe burns from a bomb blast. "I've not seen this volume and this intensity before," she said.
On her last mission, she treated an average of 10 patients a day, with around 60 per cent under the age of 15. She said malnutrition and antibiotic shortages worsened patient outcomes. "We were unable to prevent infection, and then unable to treat infection."
The humanitarian crisis in Gaza has deepened since Israel's brutal war began following the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack. More than 57,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, have been killed in airstrikes and bombings by the Israeli forces.
Victoria Rose left Gaza on June 3. She said she still thinks about the children who did not survive and the colleagues she left behind.
