London plastic surgeon’s life-saving Gaza mission

“I just want a ceasefire so that we can catch up,” Dr. Victoria Rose told her video newspaper filmed in a Gazan hospital, while the victims kept coming.

The Plastic Surgeon consultant recently took leave of her day job at St Thomas in London hospital to work voluntarily in Gaza, helping the victims of her war with Israel.

The “appalling” levels of malnutrition and famine had settled when it went in May, and the number of victims increased quickly, she told the BBC.

“Mass victims did not stop. It was really shocking.”

At the beginning, Miss Rose and her colleagues mainly dealt with the injuries of the explosion – a “large number” of serious burns as well as injuries with bursts of shells.

But towards the end of his stay, they became “completely absorbed by ball wounds,” she said. “That’s really all we have seen.”

It is work that she says difficult, but she says that when she is in Gaza, she does not have time to think about the level of suffering she sees.

“I’m just trying to do as much as possible in the very short time as I have, so that we can make a difference.”

Miss Rose volunteers for charitable ideals (international disaster and emergency aid with long -term support), which has sent doctors to the region since 2009.

“It’s difficult but you know what you are doing … because of the lack of plastic surgeons in Gaza, you will know that everything you do will make a big difference.

“So I just want to work and continue.”

She was deployed at Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza, the same hospital which was hit in a series of fatal Israeli attacks last week.

There, his team resumed the ground floor in theaters, performing a 24-hour plastic surgery throughout their 28-day stay.

Miss Rose described working late at night, in difficult conditions.

She said that with limited access to food, the team has largely survived the energy bars and dried food packets they had brought with them.

A lack of fuel meant that hospitals had to ration the use of energy, so that they cannot use the air conditioning system.

In addition to deadly air strikes and shots, the Palestinians are also threatened by the disease due to poor sanitation following the war, said Miss Rose.

This has led to a sharp increase in the disease, she told BBC London.

The “most disturbing” among them, she says, is an increase in cases of flange paralysis – a disease that sees the immune system attacking the nerves of the body, ultimately causing paralysis and death.

“Usually, Gaza would see a few cases a year, but in the last month, they had 37 cases in people under the age of 15,” she said.

‘Really shocking’

She now made three trips to Gaza since the war broke out in October 2023.

Whenever she returned, Miss Rose feels that the situation seemed to become more desperate.

“Seeing (the country) disintegrating in this refugee camp was really, really shocking for us,” she said.

During her first visit in March 2024, she worked at the European Hospital in Gaza, where she found ordinary citizens taking refuge.

“All the gardens were full of tents … While you went down the corridors, there would be wall zones with carpets and sheets and there would be whole families living behind them on a few mattresses on the ground.

“And it was really surprising at this stage, the level of disturbance that had occurred.”

Upon her return to Gaza in August 2024, she was shocked by the extent of the physical damage that the war had caused.

“It was like going through the shooting of a landscape film in a route or something. There were no standing structures.

“When we entered, we did not see life during the first 15 minutes of the journey.”

Many hospitals in Gaza have been attacked by Israel since the start of the war, and Miss Rose says that people have trouble accessing help.

Israel maintains that Hamas uses hospitals and other civil infrastructure to protect its fighters – an accusation of Hamas NIE.

Miss Rose said that now she was at home, she has trouble looking at the coverage of war news.

Instead, she wants to focus on future missions and collect funds to move them forward.

The ideals continue to send a team to Gaza each month, but says that it becomes more difficult for doctors to access the region.

“I would love to go back, but I am quite convinced that my application will be refused in my next try,” she said.

Her family does not want her to return to the war zone.

“They went through a lot of stress on the work we have done … and it becomes very difficult to pass people through it.”

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