'Huge amount' of Gaza surgery on children, says UK doctor

'Huge amount' of Gaza surgery on children, says UK doctor A British surgeon who recently returned from Gaza has told the BBC how she was struck by the high number of wounded children she operated on.

Dr Victoria Rose said a "huge amount" of her work was on children under 16, including many under six.

She said she had treated people with bullet wounds, burns and other injuries.

She added the lack of food available in Gaza meant patients were not strong enough to heal properly.

Over 76,000 Gazans - mainly civilians - have been injured by Israel over the course of the war, the Hamas-run health ministry says, while 33,000 people have been killed.

The war was sparked by Hamas attacking Israeli communities near Gaza last October, killing about 1,200 people, mainly civilians, and taking about 250 hostages to Gaza.

Dr Rose, a consultant plastic surgeon, spent two weeks from late March at the European Gaza Hospital near Khan Younis in southern Gaza.

The "most shocking bit" was that during the trip she only operated on one person who at 53 was older than her, she told the BBC's Today programme.

"Everybody else was younger than me. A huge amount of my work was under-16s. Quite a worrying proportion of my work was six and under."

Dr Rose was carrying out reconstructive surgery on people who had been wounded.

"It was burns, shrapnel injuries, removing foreign bodies from tissue, reconstructing defects in faces, removing bullets from jaws, that kind of thing," she said.

The lack of food in Gaza - where the UN has warned of imminent famine - also meant many sick and injured people were not strong enough to fight off infection or heal properly from their wounds, she added.

"The people on my operating table were undernourished. A lot of them were cachectic," she said, referring to people experiencing extreme weight loss and muscle wasting.

"When we were looking at some of our patients who were not doing so well, there was a lot more infection than I've ever seen anywhere else.

"A lot of people's protein levels were in their boots, their haemoglobin levels were down. They are just not getting any nutrients, any vitamins or minerals."