Buried Out Of Sight

Deliberate Israeli Targeting Of Palestinian Children Becomes ‘Local News’ On The BBC

Imagine an experienced Ukrainian surgeon breaking down in front of a committee of British MPs as he related how Russian forces had been deliberately targeting Ukrainian children.

Imagine the surgeon had had to operate in desperate conditions on young children who had been lying injured after a Russian bombing attack and who were then ‘picked off’ by Russian drones. The atrocity claims would be headline news all across Western media. 

Here, in the real world, the horrific testimony of a British surgeon who had operated on children in Gaza targeted by Israeli drones after Israeli bombing attacks– something that happened ‘day after day after day’ – has been largely blanked.

Professor Nizam Mamode, a retired NHS surgeon who recently returned after working at Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza, said he had ‘never seen anything on this scale, ever’. He has worked in a number of conflicts around the world, including the genocide in Rwanda.

Prof Mamode worked for a month between August and September as a volunteer for the charity, Medical Aid for Palestinians. In a hearing on the humanitarian situation in Gaza, he told members of the UK parliamentary International Development Committee :

‘Drones would come down and pick off civilians, children. This is not an occasional thing. This was day after day after day operating on children who would say, “I was lying on the ground after a bomb dropped and this quadcopter [a small, remotely-piloted helicopter drone] came down and hovered over me and shot me”.’

Prof Mamode told MPs he saw children with sniper injuries to the head. He also noted that the pellets fired by most drones were more destructive than bullets which would go straight through a victim’s body. Instead, the pellets would bounce around inside bodies, creating much more extensive damage.

A seven-year-old boy, who had been caught up in an Israeli bombing and then deliberately hit by an Israeli drone, came into the hospital with his stomach hanging out of his chest. He had further injuries to his liver, spleen, bowel and arteries.

‘He survived that and went out a week later. Whether he is still alive, I don’t know.’

The surgeon broke down three times during his testimony. He described one case of an 8-year-old girl who was bleeding to death during surgery:

‘I asked for a swab and they said, “No more swabs”’.

As he spoke to the MPs, he was momentarily overcome with emotion.

Simple medical items, such as sterile gloves and painkillers, are in short supply because of Israel’s blocking of aid into Gaza, said Prof Mamode. This also applies to basic items like soap and shampoo, leading to unhygienic conditions.

He added:

‘I saw I don't know how many wounds with maggots in [them]. One of my colleagues took maggots out of a child’s throat in intensive care. There were flies in operating theatre landing in wounds.’

He told MPs that he had spent the entire month in the hospital, partly because it was not safe to travel around. But also because, in January 2024, Israel had bombed the guest house used by Medical Aid for Palestinians.

The surgeon believes that this was done deliberately by Israeli forces:

‘All of those guest houses are in the Israeli army’s computers and are designated safe houses, so my assumption is that it was a deliberate attack and the aim behind it is to discourage aid workers from coming.’

He said the same applied to five Israeli attacks on UN convoys, including one while he was in Gaza.

Labour MP and committee chair Sarah Champion asked Prof Mamode if he meant that rogue snipers were shooting at the armoured vehicles.

‘No, no. This is the Israeli army coming up as a unit and deliberately shooting.’

Prof Mamode’s Palestinian colleagues told him that when Israeli forces attacked the hospital in February, they killed members of staff and deposited them in a mass grave with dead patients. Many other colleagues were taken away. The surgeon related one such case:

‘They [Israeli soldiers] just took him away and killed him. That's what's going on. As far as I can see, it doesn't matter who you are in Gaza. If you are a Palestinian in Gaza, you are a target.’

Champion said in her parliamentary summary:

‘The Committee will do all we can to act on Professor Mamode’s extraordinary testimony and ensure his experiences are heard loud and clear. If leaders are not yet listening, they should be by now.’

This should have generated massive coverage across national news media, with the Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Foreign Minister David Lammy being bombarded by questions from journalists on what action the UK government would now take. Instead, there has been virtual silence. As far as we can tell, there was no broadcast coverage on BBC News, Sky News or ITV, although Channel 4 News did include an item on Prof Mamode's testimony, at least on its X feed (we could not find a broadcast item, however, on the Channel 4 News programme catch-up page). We do not have the resources to monitor all television and radio programmes, so we cannot rule out that there was a passing mention on the BBC World Service or elsewhere.

Nor were there any editorials or significant coverage in major news reports in UK national newspapers. Prof Mamode’s appearance before the parliamentary committee was reported in a live Guardian blog about Gaza on 12 November, but his most compelling and harrowing evidence was omitted or glossed over. To his credit, Owen Jones mentioned the surgeon’s account in a Guardian opinion piece.

The appalling lack of serious coverage is actually highlighted by the fact that there was one article on the BBC News website about Prof Mamode’s testimony to the committee (we were alerted to it by a post on X by one of our followers). The article was titled, 'Gaza surgeon describes drones targeting children'. As is often the case, the word 'Israel' or 'Israeli' - as in 'Israeli drones' - was missing from the headline. In other words, the perpetrator of violence was missing. Moreover, rather than refer to Prof Mamode as a British surgeon, he was labelled as a 'Gaza surgeon', perhaps implying that he was employed by the 'Hamas-run health ministry', the phrase that is routinely deployed in BBC News reports.

But here was the most glaring feature of the piece: rather than being placed on the front page or even somewhere in the section marked, ‘Israel-Gaza war’, a glaring misnomer for an ongoing genocide, it appeared deep inside the BBC's ‘Local News’ category on the page for ‘Hampshire & Isle of Wight’. (As far as we know, it never appeared in a more prominent place on the BBC News website. But the fact that the bottom of the article contains the line, ‘Get in touch: Do you have a story BBC Hampshire & Isle of Wight should cover?’, suggests that it was immediately placed in that section). The same treatment was afforded to an earlier BBC News article in October, shortly after the surgeon had returned from Gaza, but with the most disturbing details about the deliberate targeting of children omitted.

Why place such an important story in the 'Hampshire & Isle Of Wight' local news section of the BBC website? The ostensible reason is that Prof Mamode comes from Brockenhurst, a New Forest village in Hampshire. But surely the real reason was to minimise public attention and thus evade pressure from the powerful Israel lobby. After all, as we have mentioned before, senior BBC News staff have admitted to ‘waiting in fear for the phone call from the Israelis’. The Israel lobby's weaponising of antisemitism, which was deployed to prevent Jeremy Corbyn becoming Prime Minister, is being used to suppress or silence criticism of Israel. This has had a crippling effect on journalism and free speech.

Regular readers will recall the dearth of media coverage given to the harrowing testimony provided by Professor Nick Maynard, a UK surgeon who works as a consultant gastrointestinal surgeon at Oxford University Hospital, when he returned from Gaza earlier this year. He had described the clear, deliberate targeting of hospital and healthcare facilities; but also the actual execution of Palestinian surgeons and other medical staff.

In April, Prof Maynard said that Israeli forces are:

‘systematically targeting healthcare facilities, healthcare personnel and really dismantling the whole healthcare system.’

He described what had happened to Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza where he had previously worked, and where around 400 Palestinians had reportedly been killed in a brutal two-week attack by Israeli forces:

‘Every single part of the hospital has been destroyed. The whole infrastructure of the hospital has been destroyed. When I spoke to Marwan [a Palestinian colleague] yesterday, he told me there were 107 patients, 60 medical staff. God only knows what has happened to them. I think we’ve seen some of the pictures. Surgeons I know have been executed in the last 48 hours there. Bodies have been discovered in the last 12-24 hours who had been handcuffed, with their hands behind their back. [Our added emphasis].’

He added:

‘And so, there is no doubt at all, that multiple healthcare workers have been executed there in the last few days.’

All of the above, taken together with the media’s recent gaslighting about a supposed ‘pogrom’ against rampaging Israeli football fans chanting genocidal, anti-Arab slogans in Amsterdam last week – disinformation expertly dissected by Richard Sanders for Double Down News – reveals like never before the monstrous, genocide-enabling reality of ‘mainstream’ news media.

Meanwhile, Israel appears able to continue unimpeded in its brutal drive towards a ‘Greater Israel’, openly espoused by Netanyahu and other Israeli politicians, which would require the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians ‘from the Jordan to the sea’.

DC

Correction added 15 November, 2024

It has been brought to our attention that the 'Gaza Surgeon' story does, in fact, appear in the BBC's 'Israel-Gaza war' section, if you scroll down far enough.

This version, far down the news page, was captured just 47 mins after the article was published.

The point remains that the article was primarily tagged as a local 'Hampshire & Isle of Wight' news story and was never given anything like the prominence it merited on the BBC News website.