I'd like people to know that the Gaza people are almost exactly the same as them. If they imagined some of the horrors happening to their own family, I suspect voices would be louder about trying to get something done...

EVA MILLETT speaks to Dr Iain Lennon, who has spent weeks working at the World Health Organisation field hospital in southern Gaza

- EVA MILLETT

A DERBY doctor has returned from war-torn Gaza with a firsthand account of the brutal conditions facing patients and frontline medics.

Dr Iain Lennon, an emergency medicine consultant at the Royal Derby Hospital, has spent weeks working at the World Health Organisation (WHO) field hospital in southern Gaza with UK-Med, a Manchester-based emergency medical charity.

Since January 2024, UK-Med has been operating two emergency field hospitals in Gaza, treating nearly half a million patients in response to the humanitarian crisis.

Dr Lennon, aged 53, has 25 years' experience working with the NHS and UK-Med. He has treated patients as part of the Rohingya emergency in Bangladesh in 2017, and the Covid-19 pandemic.

He described the experience in Gaza as unlike anything he had faced before, despite having been on previous deployments to the region.

Dr Lennon said: “Places I've been before tended to have something of a functioning medical system, but Gaza's medical system is very much hanging on by a thread now in terms of its own capacity. It’s a very different environment to be in.”

UK-Med's two field hospitals are among five still standing on the Gaza strip and a drop in the ocean needed to serve the 2.1 million population that remains, many of whom have been displaced many times over.

The UK-Med type 2 hospital, where Dr Lennon was based, treated hundreds of patients each day. UK-Med says a type 2 hospital offers primary health care.

It normally accommodates up to 100 patient beds and offers services in emergency and trauma surgical care, obstetric and newborn care, nutrition, child protection, mental health, and services for women and girls who have experienced violence.

Dr Lennon said: “The vast majority of the patients who attend the UK-Med hospitals are coming seeking basically primary health care support. But on top of that, our emergency departments were seeing upwards of 120 patients a day.