Gaza’s Healthcare Crisis: Parliamentary Briefing
On the 2nd July 2025, ICJP and the Labour Muslim Network (LMN) hosted “Gaza’s Healthcare Crisis: A Parliamentary Briefing”. The powerful event brought together three medical professionals, two of whom had just recently returned from Gaza, providing a platform for these doctors to share their eyewitness accounts of the humanitarian and medical crisis unfolding in Gaza. Having worked in Nasser Hospital, in the South of the Gaza Strip near to two ‘Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’ (GHF) sites, the doctors relayed directly what the GHF looks like in practice: daily massacres. The three British doctors gave testimony before an audience that included MPs, staffers, journalists, activists, and members of the public.
The Panellists:
Dr Goher Rahbour is an NHS consultant and general surgeon who completed a volunteer medical mission to Gaza’s Nasser hospital from May to June 2025 with Medical Aid for Palestinians. Dr Rahbour he spoke of operating in conditions of extreme trauma, with “complete lack of antiseptic solutions”. “Sunday 1st June 2025 was the day of two mass casualties. The first was with the so-called food distribution centres.” There were 200 patients who arrived at Nasser hospital and an additional 30 dead on arriving, with victims testifying that Israeli forces fired upon them: “they came up from the tanks”. Dr Rahbour stated that “mass casualty events just kept happening…copious blood on the floor. Children dead on arrival. Children with limbs gone, bullets, shrapnel, suffering.” There was one case of a “woman in her early 30s, 24 weeks pregnant, she had been shot while lying in a tent… she needed a hysterectomy”. Not only did she lose a 24 week foetus which had been killed, she would never be able to have any more children. “They have seen so much death that it appears they have become numb to it.”
Dr Victoria Rose is an NHS surgeon who completed three volunteer medical missions in Gaza in March and August 2024 and May 2025. Of her recent experience, she stated that “in May, I have operated on more children in one month than I had done for more than 30 years in the NHS.” She explained: “we ran out of blades for out scalpels, which meant that we were re-sterilising instruments that are seen as single use and that is a massive infection risk. But we had no other choice because nothing was getting in to us, no aid had arrived since the 2nd of March.” When asked what Parliamentarians could to to help, Dr. Rose requested that they would be most useful if they could “face the atrocity that is the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” and secure a return to UN aid delivery.
Dr James Smith is an emergency physician and lecturer in humanitarian policy and practice at UCL, he completed medical missions in Gaza in January and June of 2024, before being rejected by Israeli authorities twice in 2025. Dr Smith displayed photos of those whom he treated in Gaza, and the deliberate destruction of medical instruments and facilities by Israeli forces. He, too, condemned the GHF – stating that “it is not humanitarian, these are not food distribution centres, these are killing fields.” He ended by saying that “we must take collective responsibility, be it actionists on the street, and most certainly be it Parliamentarians who have been elected to represent us.”
Read more about the event as written up in Hyphen: Lucas Cumiskey, 3rd July 2025, MPs banned Palestine Action while doctors told Parliament of Gaza horrors