• Drone operator ‘waited until he was in his tent and greeted his three children and killed all of them’
• British doctor: Situation in Palestinian enclave ‘absolutely desperate’

Arab News

LONDON: A British doctor who recently returned from Gaza told Sky News that an Israeli drone pursued her colleague home and killed his family.

Nada Al-Hadithy said the situation in Gaza is “absolutely desperate.” One of her patients, a 21-year-old woman who was six months pregnant, lost her baby after an Israeli bomb detonated near her tent, seriously injuring her.

“Her husband was killed, she lost her eye, she had an open fracture and both her legs were completely destroyed from the bomb blast,” Al-Hadithy said.

“This woman is completely emaciated, with no vitamins, no food. And one day her baby stopped moving.”

A “school classroom’s worth of children” are dying in Gaza every day, the doctor said, adding that many Gazan health workers are suffering from starvation along with the general population there.

In the three weeks she worked in Gaza, Al-Hadithy said there was a “tangible difference in the amount of starvation and the emaciation of our patients.”

She added: “Even the severity of and relentlessness of the bombings was worse. It was mass casualty after mass casualty, with people being blown up in their tents, which were meant to be in green zones. The situation was catastrophic.”

She described her colleague whose family was killed by an Israeli drone as “patient, joyful and hardworking.”

He was followed home, according to eyewitness testimony from Al-Hadithy and other medical workers, by an Israeli quadcopter first-person-view drone.

The drone’s operator chose not to “kill him on the route where he was on his own,” she said. Instead, the operator “waited until he was in his tent and greeted his three children and killed all of them.”

Al-Hadithy said she regularly saw emaciated children while working in Gaza, adding: “You’ve got 2 million starving people in (an area) the same size as Exeter, which in our country and in our census in 2021 had 130,000 people in it. That’s 2 million people with no water, no sanitation, no food, no medical supplies.”

She praised her Palestinian colleagues in Gaza’s besieged health sector, saying: “Never before have I seen such dignified, committed people.”