Royal Navy surgeon describes the horror

Occupied Jerusalem: A British Royal Navy surgeon who spent two weeks performing trauma surgery inside the Gaza Strip has spoken of the horror of seeing so many children with severe injuries.

"I have worked in war zones before,'" Harald Veen, 49, who is normally based at the Princess Royal medical centre in Gibraltar, said. "But the number of children with appalling injuries took a heavy toll.

"You would see a beautiful little child and then turn them over to find a huge hole which meant death or a life of misery as a quadriplegic.

The flow of patients kept coming 'day and night', Veen said. "Unlike any other combat zone the people of Gaza have nowhere to run, so they just keep getting hurt."

He was part of a four-member emergency surgery team sent into Gaza by the International Committee of the Red Cross at the beginning of Israel's operation Cast Lead.

Wounded

After three days of delays at the Israeli crossing into Gaza, the team were allowed in and began working at the 600-bed Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, the biggest hospital in the territory.

"At a rough estimate the hospital was seeing between 50 and 100 war wounded arriving every day, of which I would say 20 to 30 needed operations," he said. "The vast majority were deep, penetration blast wounds - shrapnel deep inside the abdomen or the brain --and many cases where external limbs were blown off.