I CAN'T LEAVE NO ONE WILL TAKE MY PLACE

Brit surgeon one of last in overwhelmed Gaza

- NICK SOMMERLAD

A BRITISH surgeon working in the last functioning operating theatre in Gaza City has told the Mirror he cannot leave because they are "overwhelmed".

In a series of bleak voice messages Professor Ghassan Abu-Sittah said he can only operate to save the dying, those who are "bleeding out".

His patients this weekend included a girl, six, who needed an arm and leg amputating and a boy, nine, with a 5cm piece of shrapnel in his bowels.

There is no blood left, so patients die after surgery, and the medics have run out of ketamine - used as a substitute for anaesthetic.

Prof Abu-Sittah, who has a wife and three sons at home in London, said: "I can't leave. If I leave my space is not filled." He and two other surgeons work from two theatres at a field hospital in the grounds of Ahli Arab where Hospital hundreds died in a blast last month.

The 52-year-old British Palestinian had been due to travel to Gaza before the Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7, when around 1,200 were killed.

He has been operating for 33 days straight from two Gaza City hospitals.

Before he left the al-Shifa Hospital, he described seeing "multiple cases of acute malnutrition and dehydration in young children" and 120 cases of "wounded child with no surviving family" at the hospital.