Israel's killer drones 'pick off' Gaza's children

Plea to UK government to examine its position under international law after surgeon delivers testimony

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A British MP has vowed to confront the UK government with evidence that Israeli drones are killing children in Gaza in a practice that challenges the country's claim to use technology to precisely hit targets in battle. There was “no justification at all” for Israeli drones shooting children, Sarah Champion, Labour MP for Rotherham, told The National after listening to a top surgeon's account of treating the Israeli military's victims in Gaza.

I want the [British] government to come back robustly and tell us what it's doing to uphold international law

Sarah Champion

Ms Champion, chairwoman of the international development committee, pledged to take up the claims with the UK government after Prof Nizam Mamode, who works in Britain, told parliament how children had been hit by rounds fired from unmanned aerial vehicles. After the evidence from the transplant surgeon, Ms Champion said the government would need to explain what it is doing to hold Israel to account, to ensure international law is upheld.

During a previous trip to the Gaza border, Ms Champion had been told that Israeli drones had facial recognition technology, making the targeting of young people, documented by images handed over by the medic, all the more difficult to understand. “I find it impossible not to think that that is deliberate,” she said.

Prof Mamode said he was particularly disturbed by treating children at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis. “So the drones would come down and pick off civilians, children,” he said. Children told him they were lying on the ground after a bomb dropped when “this quadcopter came down, hovered over me, and shot me”, he added.

In a hard-hitting response the UK's foreign office told The National that Israel had to do "much more" to protect civilians. “The death and destruction in Gaza is intolerable and we have been clear that Israel must do much more to ensure civilians are protected. International humanitarian law must be upheld, and we have raised this with Israel at the highest levels," it said in a statement.

A drone operates during an Israeli raid, in Tubas in the occupied West Bank. Reuters

Autonomous weapons

“What he described is unlike any other war zone that he's been to because of the horror of what he found,” Ms Champion told The National. “It had a deeply profound impact on me and my colleagues.”

She said she had not been aware that Israel had such lethal drones or that they were shooting small children. “I can't see any justification at all for that to happen,” she said.

Prof Mamode was the clinical lead in transplant surgery at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust and honorary consultant at Great Ormond Street Hospital until 2020. The doctor, who also worked in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide, gave his evidence to MPs, highlighting that up to 70 per cent of patients treated in the southern Gaza hospital were women or children.

Ms Champion was not accusing Israel of deliberately targeting children, but making the point it claimed to have the technology to avoid unintentional deaths. In a statement the Israeli military said it had not sought to kill children.

“In stark contrast to Hamas's intentional attacks on Israeli men, women and children, the IDF (Israel Defence Forces) follows international law and takes feasible precautions to mitigate civilian harm,” it said. “The IDF has never, and will never, deliberately target children.”

Prof Mamode said the pattern of wounds that children suffered was evidence they had been carried out by drone strikes. He described a symmetrical configuration of three or four shots down one side of a person’s chest and the same number down the other side. “We all thought this was prima facie evidence of an autonomous drone or a semi-autonomous drone because a human operator would not be able to fire with that degree of accuracy, that quickly,” he said.

He then described the drone rounds that had struck a seven-year-old boy. “These pellets were in a way more destructive than bullets,” he said. “With the drone pellets, what I found was they would go in and they would bounce around, so they would cause multiple injuries.”

However the doctor, who worked in Gaza for a month this summer, managed to save the child’s life. The committee also heard testimony about Israeli snipers who shot a medic in the chest, through her Palestinian Red Crescent badge, as she went to the aid of another person.

Nizam Mamode at Nasser Hospital in Gaza. Photo: MAP

Humanitarian law

Ms Champion said there was now clear evidence that if the rules of combat were “not being deliberately broken, they are being stretched”. She urged the British government to be “very front foot in enforcing international humanitarian laws” on Israel.

She said the evidence was backed up by data and pictures taken by Prof Mamode. “It's literally evidence that we can lay in front of them,” she stated. “I want the [British] government to come back robustly and tell us what it's doing to uphold international law.” The National has also approached the Israeli military for comment.

Prof Mamode also warned that access to medical aid was worse when he went into Gaza in August than at the beginning of the year. According to the UN, in October, daily food distribution shrank by nearly 25 per cent compared to September. Only 37 lorries entered Gaza per day during the month of October.

Trump stability

The Middle East is also likely to experience uncertainty in the coming months as it awaits the return of Donald Trump to the White House after he won the US election, Ms Champion said. While in his last term Mr Trump “definitely emboldened Israeli politicians”, she could see no other “viable solution” than the two-state solution, “not just for Israel and Palestine, but for the whole Middle East stability”.

She suggested that Mr Trump would “put some really smart people” in top posts and hoped they would have an “intelligent, big-picture approach” rather than rushing decisions on the region. “If he doesn't have an intelligent approach to this, the consequences are going to bite the rest of the world, as well as the US, pretty hard,” she said.

She also argued that a “powerful tool” in preventing conflict had been removed when Boris Johnson, the former prime minister, shut the Department for International Development (Dfid) in 2021. Dfid had the convening power to “get everybody around the table,” she said. “We could get the international community to speak with one voice.”