A heroic medic has lifted the lid on his work treating Palestinian children with appalling injuries inflicted on them by Israeli attacks in Gaza. Ramsbottom man Dr Matt Newport, 37, works for East Lancashire Teaching Hospitals in Blackburn and Burnley, and has just returned from his third visit to Gaza amid relentless Israeli airstrikes this year. He has been working there as an anaesthetist for the Manchester-based medical charity UK-Med and say he now gives his two-year old daughter “extra big hugs” when home.
Dr Newport said: “It’s the huge number of wounded children and women that has left a real impact on me right down to babies just a day or two old and weighing just a couple of kilograms. “An air strike in Khan Younis on July 7 brought 30 trauma patients to our emergency department over the course of two hours. “When the dust settled, we had seven bodies in our mortuary, including a very young boy who had been shot through the heart and was dead on arrival.
“The child’s father was brought in with him, near-death, after a bullet to the head. “Shamefully, I avoided eye contact with the mother of the family, not knowing if I could hold it together while thinking of my own wife and two-year-old daughter back in the UK.” More than 40,000 people, most of them civilians, have been killed in Gaza since the most recent stage of the conflict.
Over the last weekend an Israeli airstrike killed 19 people, including a woman and her six children. Dr Newport: “As.