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Gaza

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Suffering

War & peace

12 February 2024

11 min read

Eye witness: life and death in Gaza’s European Hospital

Returning plastic surgeon Tim Goodacre reports on the struggles, the despair and the dignity of the people and the medics of Gaza during their long nightmare.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

Medical staff stand beside a bed in which a man lies with an amputated leg.

Medics confer about a patient in Gaza's European Hospital.

Tim Goodacre

Tim Goodacre is a vastly experienced plastic surgeon who recently spent two weeks in a hospital in Khan Younis treating the extensive injuries of the people of Gaza. I caught up with him to ask about his experience there.

Graham: Let me start by asking what was it like getting into Gaza? What was the process and how difficult was it to actually get in in the first place?

Tim: We went in as an emergency medical team under the under the auspices of the World Health Organisation, which is coordinated with UN OCHR. It was easy obviously to get to Cairo. Then we joined a convoy, a group of cars convening in the small hours of the morning in Cairo and then being escorted across the Sinai desert. We got to the border in time for dusk. What was staggering at that stage was seeing the number of lorries lined up, waiting on the Egyptian side to get in. They were two deep on one side, one deep on the other with a thin passageway through which we could drive through for mile after mile after mile of these lorries.

Was this humanitarian aid sent from other nations?

Absolutely. It was aid labelled from different countries or agencies. Crossing Rafah the next morning was all pretty haphazard and chaotic, but we met our driver on the other side. We then had to travel to Khan Yunis on the coast road because it was the safest part of the south Gaza strip. We went through a route called the Philadelphia Road, which is a gap between the two borders. As we drove along, we immediately were jumped on by some young lads who had put razor wire across the road. We picked up two of them who hung onto the car each side, with our window s firmly shut. As we sped along, they were our ‘protectors’, taking a pitiful sum to ensure that we would not be stopped at further razor wire and our vehicle plundered. It was our first experience of the lawlessness that's inherent at the moment in Gaza.

All along that side of the road there were people putting up new tents after a recent further mass displacement, as far as the eye could see. It made a huge impact on me - the devastating plight of the people who were there. It looked like those pictures of Glastonbury or Woodstock, where as far as you could see, the rolling fields or sand dunes or whatever were totally covered in makeshift dwellings. It was pretty cold and windy. And subsequently, while we were there, it rained an awful lot and your heart just went out to these people.

So these were people living in tents and temporary shelters?

Well, not really. They're barely tents. They're just finding flimsy bits of wood, putting them up and nailing them together. And these are not just the very poorest of the poor. This is everybody. Many of them were people from very well-to-do houses whose families have been displaced. I've worked in many parts of the world where there's poverty, but I’ve never seen so many people displaced.

One of the things that's remarkable however is the relative cleanliness, the desire to maintain dignity in the most appalling circumstances. But a young lad who’s now a young doctor (who I have worked with for a decade now) came to see me and he was the most dejected person I've ever met. He said to me ‘they've taken away my dignity’. The abject pain in his face was something that I won't forget.

You’ve been to Gaza many times before. What was different about this time? And you've seen it in the aftermath of previous wars and conflicts. What was what was particularly different this time?

It's utterly different – it’s the displaced population with nowhere to go and seeking shelter. When I first went in 2014 after Operation Protective Edge, I was taken to a huge neighbourhood of northeast Gaza, which had been flattened and at the time the impact on me was extraordinary. When I’ve visited subsequently over the last decade, they will show you this bombed out building and that flattened area, but I've never seen such vast numbers of displaced people. On the second day we moved into the European Gaza Hospital (EGH), which is where we were going to stay for the two weeks we were there. Inching slowly along amidst endless hordes of people walking around, seeing the dejection, despair, the hopelessness with nowhere to go - this for me is what defines this whole episode and makes it very different from others. This is in no way a diminution of other conflicts and human tragedies, but when there was bombing in Baghdad or in Kiev and Ukraine, people might go into underground shelters - there are places they can perhaps go to escape. Even in massacres such as in Darfur or Congo, there are places to run to. There is nothing like that in Gaza.

Was there a pattern to the kind of medical emergencies and wounds that you were having to deal with?

The vast majority of injuries were the impact of high explosives, so we naturally saw quite a lot of burns, although the majority of severe burns alone were being managed by the Red Cross team also at EGH. Some of them were people who had been crushed and pulled out of buildings which had collapsed. But that was that was the minority. The majority of our cases were direct results of bomb blasts. Every time you hear a bomb, somebody is being killed, yet many others are caught on the fringe of that. Shrapnel travels at astronomical speeds and hits people in in a completely random way. These injuries are devastating. There were scores of people coming in with limbs missing. Seeing somebody with a leg off at the thigh, a leg off below the knee, an arm ripped off was all too common. It was hard to take in - you have to become somewhat immune to the backstory behind each dreadful injury, and concentrate on the carnage in front of you, to be able to deal with the constant onslaught of cases.

How were the medics coping with it? You were there for two weeks. They are there for months, presumably on end?

I think it's incredibly important that we don't focus on the visiting medics. I usually peeled off at about 9pm or so in the evening - I had to go to bed and had to have a rest, but there were people trying to work through the night. What I want to focus on is the local people, particularly a young colleague, Ahmed, who was 36 years-old. He was statesmanlike in his ability to pull things together. His family are actually mostly in Dublin as they've got Irish passports. I cannot tell you how much admiration I have for that young Gazan man who shared his room with me.

He has been managing to create a team who work alongside him, since many of the staff who had worked at the hospital before (some of whom we had trained over several years in limb reconstruction) were not there. That is because they might not be alive, or having to support their displaced families, or simply are afraid to travel in daily to the hospital, or whatever. It is a huge demand on individual doctors to leave a family group (who invariably try to stay together, so that if they are bombed, they all die together and do not have to be a sole survivor.) to then work away from such possible loss of all their family members. It's an incredible sacrifice to be working in medical care when your family are all huddled together in a place where they may all lose their life, and that gets to them in the end.

The orthopaedic side is almost on its knees. Most of the system in the hospital is utterly on its knees. There were early years medical students who had been taught quickly how to manage wounds and to skin graft. They haven't got any pay, but some people have given a little money to my colleague’s account to try and give them some support. There were IT students and all sorts of others pulling together. How people can work in in such adversity and make things happen is quite a testament to the to the strength of humanity.

It all begins to play on your mind, and you start thinking is there another one coming? And you get no warning when the attacks are unleashed.

What was it like living under the bombardment, which was presumably pretty constant during your time there?

There may have been the odd period of four or five hours when there was no sound of close bombardment at all, although during that time there was probably small arms fire going on somewhere. But otherwise, it was relentless. One became somewhat used to the bombs in the distance, but when they're close by… Every time one of these bombs goes off, there are people dying. And that really that played on your mind. So huge numbers were seeking shelter anywhere in the vicinity of the hospital. If you can imagine a hospital corridor where every route is full of makeshift shelters, and you just go up around a stairwell and on the corner of each stair, there will be a family which will be hanging drapes up, trying to find some sort of privacy and dignity among the utter destitution.

I found it very difficult to sleep during those times. The hospital is in a quadrant, a square. On one corner there was a supermarket which latterly was hit by an F16 delivered weapon. You could hear the sound of the rocket go off alongside the scream of the low flying fighter jet, and the whole building shook. There's also the incessant sound of drones. It all begins to play on your mind, and you start thinking is there another one coming? And you get no warning when the attacks are unleashed.

It made me realise what soldiers undergo when they get what used to be called shell shock. There, even if you're not injured yourself, this constant shocking damage gets to you. I knew we had the knowledge that after a short time, we would be getting out - but it made me realise how tough Ahmed and others working there have to be. It will be having a devastating impact on the population, and for a nation.

I imagine the psychological effects of that are going to last for a long time in the lives of these people. You don't get over that quickly. If you live with that level of tension, thinking any moment now, I could die, that must stay with you and the marks of that stay for a long time.

I'm sure that's true. I'm not an expert in PTSD and things like that. Ahmed is a Muslim and said to me more than once that when you believe in an afterlife, you believe that your time will come at some point, and you accept that. We don't know when it is or where it is, but it will come. I have frequently wondered whether any of the fighter jet pilots have ever experienced themselves what it’s like to be underneath the impact of one of their weapons? Having felt somewhat what it is like to be on the other side of such an onslaught, I do wonder whether very many of those involved in ordering conflict really have any kind of understanding of what devastation feels like, when there is nowhere to run? I fear for what this conflict does to the humanity of both sides.

I genuinely don't feel brave, I don't. I'm not the kind of person who sees lights in the sky, but I know it was God’s calling to go there. It was simply the right thing,

Did you see any sign of hope or anything that gave you a sense of the way out of this?

The sense of hope is within the people who are there. There are many people who say they still really don't want to leave. They feel this passionately. It's their land. They do want to see a new Gaza. I tried to be somebody who lifted spirits. Communities can be rebuilt and there may be a new future which will come from the dust. I've been in touch with people in my University Medical school in Oxford to see whether we can do something about getting these young people's education continued.

You can imagine there wasn’t a lot of laughter in the whole environment, but on the few occasions when I did gather together with my colleague’s small group of young students and volunteers, usually late into the night, we would eat whatever food goodies they had to hand, and their sense of fun would burst out. Together there was a very strong sense of community amongst them.

How did your Christian faith inform the way you interacted with the situation? How did your Christian faith help you process what you were seeing and experiencing there?

I must say it was a deeply spiritual time for me. It was absolutely powerful to me to know that God cares and loves each and every one of these people. I longed to organise a football game with the kids. I was told that they had tried to do that, and it had become too dangerous. So there seemed to be no organisation around looking after the well-being of the children, their education, or the deeper impact on them of this war. People were jammed into the hospital, obviously because it was seen as a safe space, and it was humbling to think that us (as foreign workers) being there made them feel somewhat safer. It humbled me immensely.

I felt nothing but a sense of privilege in being a witness to all this. I was reading the Psalms regularly in daily prayer. There's also something about that land being the place where God himself suffered in Christ and went through his own agony, and that the Holy Family escaped through Gaza to Egypt.

I genuinely don't feel brave, I don't. I'm not the kind of person who sees lights in the sky, but I know it was God’s calling to go there. It was simply the right thing, a privilege and an honour to have such access which comes with having my particular background of skills and past history with Gaza. God is over all these matters, and we are compelled to respond.

Tim Goodacre is a Reconstructive Plastic Surgeon based in Oxford, with extensive experience of working in diverse environments outside the UK. He is immediate past Vice President of the Royal College of Surgeons of England.

Article

Church and state

Culture

Freedom of Belief

War & peace

2 July 2025

7 min read

Nigerians plead for an end to rampant murder

So-called ‘grazing conflicts’ need to be treated as a real humanitarian crisis

K.C. Nwajei

K.C. Nwajei is a freelance journalist based in Nigeria.

Displaced villagers shelter in refugee camps in Benue State.

Open Doors.

In the state of Benue in the North Central region of Nigeria, life has become short and brutish, as mothers bury their husbands and children in an endless grief pervading Nigeria’s Middle Belt region.

In a region where women and families once tilled the soil for sustenance as children played freely on farmlands, an unrelenting nightmare now unfolds with worrisome and haunting regularity.

Vicious and armed herdsmen, cloaked in impunity, have turned many villages and communities in the area into killing fields. They leave behind mass graves, charred houses, and shattered lives.

As the world watches in silence, cries from the bloodied farmlands, a steady but unabated genocide unfolds, bringing in its wake ashes of burned houses and orphans, the human cost of Nigeria’s silent killings. This is the sad reality of our times.

Many human rights groups and people of conscience say this is no longer a local conflict over grazing routes but a serious humanitarian crisis—the agony of abandoned lives in Nigeria’s killing fields crying out for justice and urgent, pragmatic international intervention before the region is wiped off the map.

The most recent of these gory tales is the Yelewata Massacre in the Guma Local Government Area of Benue state. Reports have it that more than 200 innocent, vulnerable and unsuspecting persons—children and elderly from 47 families—were killed by suspected herdsmen on June 13 and 14.

In a shocking revelation by the Nigeria’s National Bureau of Statistics, 614,937 people were killed in the country in the past year. According to a local newspaper report (Daily Trust, June 22), the death toll figure is 10 times more than in war-torn Russia and Ukraine, which stands at 67,000.

A victim of the mayhem, Janet Erdoo Terhemba, recounted her ordeal, in the news reports of the This Day newspaper.

“I wasn’t around when it happened. At first, I was told my uncle was missing. Later, they said they found my father and stepmother. But my uncle and others, including a toddler, were burnt beyond recognition. They were butchered before they were set ablaze. My uncle was butchered—his wife too. In total, I lost eight people in one night … they were killed.”

Ajim Doowuese is an internally displaced person from Yelwata. “All my children were burnt to death,” she said while sobbing. “Now I am childless.”

David Tarku recounts this: “I traveled out of town and returned late in the night. Suddenly, the herdsmen attacked. I started running with my family, but my cousins were not lucky. They were killed.”

These massacres have provoked reactions from Christian leaders, government, human rights groups, and well-meaning Nigerians, calling for decisive government actions. Pope Leo XIV, in his first official statement regarding the crisis in Nigeria, described it as “a terrible massacre in which mostly displaced civilians were murdered with extreme cruelty.” The pontiff offered prayers for security, justice, and peace for rural Christian communities he described as “relentless victims of violence.”

The Rt. Rev. Dr. N.N. Inyom Bishop Emeritus of the Diocese of Markurdi, confirmed the story, while emphasizing that this is a “genocidal attack targeted at predominantly Christian communities.”

Inyom has been a member of the Benue State Security Council through the past two administrations, and is a specialist in conflict and peace studies. “By any stretch of imagination … this is not a conflict,” he said. “It is pure genocide. … These are purely activities of terrorists to take the land of the communities. I have documents to support what I am saying, and pictures and names of the families and people killed in the Yelewata community.”

“We have been living with this crisis over the years,” he added. “The Yelewata catastrophe is unimaginable.”

“Benue state has 23 Local Government Areas, and about 17 are completely devastated. Over 1.5 million (mostly women and children) villagers are living in Internally Displaced Camps in the state.

“Before my retirement, I had six archdeaconries. Out of these six, four have been sacked by the invading terrorists,” the bishop said.

To buttress his claim, the bishop presented a list of the names and families he says have been killed during the Yelewata crisis.

He challenged church leaders, irrespective of denomination, to speak up. “If the Pope could speak from the far-away Vatican, what happened to our local leaders? Let the church not just busy or bury itself in ‘spiritual deliverance.’ We need physical deliverance for our people who are being killed. I read a book on Rwandan crisis where the United Nations was asking, ‘Where was the Church before the escalation of the Rwandan crisis?’ Let the Church in Nigeria arise and let the leaders unite and save these communities.”

He challenged the government to prioritize its duty of ensuring the security of lives of their citizens. “Government is not just about winning elections. They are looking at 2027 general elections. Meanwhile, people are being killed in 2025. Government must stop playing politics with the lives of its citizens.”

“The greatest problem, he said, is that over time, government has not summoned the political will to implement the recommendation of the Peace and Reconciliation Commission.

He called on the federal government to set up a Commission of Enquiry on this recurring crisis.

Bishop Inyom called on the international community to intervene: “This is a Macedonian call. The international communities must speak up because a serious humanitarian crisis is looming.”

Meanwhile, Amnesty International has been documenting the alarming escalation of attacks across Benue, where gunmen hold sway over the territories.

Some prominent traditional rulers and Christian leaders have continued to express frustrations.

In a strongly worded statement shared on X .com, Apostle Johnson Suleiman described the killings as evil, barbaric, and a mayhem.

At a town-hall meeting with Nigeria’s President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, professor James Ortese Iorzua Ayatse expressed his alarm:

“We do have grave concern about the misinformation and misrepresentation regarding the security crisis in Benue State. It is not herders-farmers clashes, it is not communal clashes, it is not reprisal attacks or skirmishes. It is such misinformation that has led to suggestions such as “remain tolerant, negotiate for peace, learn to live with your neighbour.

“Your Excellency, what we are dealing with in Benue is a calculated, well-planned, full-scale genocidal invasion of land-grabbing campaign by herder terrorists and bandits which has been on for decades, and it is worsening every year.

“Wrong diagnosis will always lead to wrong treatment. So we are dealing with something far more sinister than we think about. It is not learning to live with our neighbors. It is dealing with the war.”

The leader of North Central Peace Advocates, Frank Utor, in a This Day newspaper report, wrote that the killers are well-trained members and affiliates of international terror groups with the mission to levy war against the indigenous communities of Benue, Plateau, and other parts of North Central. “The killers do not rear cattle, they do not engage in any known pastoral activities,” he said.

Several media outlets have quoted elder statesmen in the communities expressing concerns about what some of them described as the “genocidal activities” of the criminal herdsmen. Some have argued and lamented that governments have failed to live up to their constitutional responsibility of protecting lives.

The media, particularly social media, are awash with news berating the political elites in the state for failing to present a united, formidable, and common front to tackle the gruesome serial murders and carnage perpetuated by these criminal armed men.

At a recent forum during the presentation of a posthumous award to Late Chief Raymond Alegho Dokpesi, a media mogul and founder of African Independent Television, the Rev. Father George Ehusani, a prominent Catholic priest and civil rights activist, said:

“A lot of the clashes in Benue state are not clashes between two people. People are in their farms and 100 people in motorcycles with AK-47 riffles invade their village, sack them, and kill many. That is not ‘two fighting.’ That is one group of people going to kill people and sack them from their villages.

“If AIT [a TV news channel] reports the news as “Clash over land in Benue state,” that would not be correct. That would be a lie.” The fact that we should communicate with gentleness does not mean we should tell lies.”

According to monitored media reports, less than 72 hours after the mayhem, a combined force of Nigeria’s military and police chiefs launched a joint, cross-border manhunt for the gunmen who killed around 200 villagers in Yelewata on the night of June 13.

Gen. Christopher Musa, the chief of defense, and Kayode Egbetokun, inspector-general of police, arrived in Markudi on June 16 to coordinate the operation. After assessing the carnage, Musa vowed to take the battle to the terrorists by changing the military’s strategy to fit the situation on ground.

President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who had previously condemned the violence in Benue state, had also directed security chiefs to implement his earlier directive to bring peace and security to the state.

Following his visit to Benue on June 18, President Tinubu directed the Benue State Governor, the Rev. Hyacinth Iormem Alia, to set up an all-inclusive peace committee for the resolution of contentious issues that have rendered past efforts fruitless.

In response, HURIWA, a human rights group, accused the Governor of showing what it describes as “aloofness to the gravity of the situation of mass slaughter of his people—women and children—by the terrorists masquerading as herders.”

This article first appeared in Livingchurch.org. Reproduced with permission.

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