Heroic Ramsbottom doctor speaks out on saving lives 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 a first-time father of a two-year-old, seeing displaced, frightened, parentless, and traumatically injured children has been quite challenging.

Dr Newport has made three trips to Gaza (Image: Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office)

“One young boy who will remain with me had injuries to his whole body that you simply don’t see in the UK.

“He was perhaps eight years old.

“In parallel his abdomen was opened, and his injured bowel repaired, whilst his right leg was amputated at the hip along with his left arm at the elbow.

“Despite our best efforts, the impact of his injuries took its toll on his young and entirely innocent body, and he died in theatre.

“We stood around him, me and one of the local health staff, in a moment of quiet reflection, then they wrapped him in white cloth and took him out to his family.

“I’m not a particularly emotional individual but what I’ve seen has made me hug my daughter Meredith that little bit tighter when I see her.

Dr Newport with daughter Meredith (Image: Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office)

“When I returned just in time for her second birthday in March, I had to opt not to pick her up from nursery because I couldn’t trust myself not to get upset in front of the nursery staff.

“It has been really hard being away, but at the same time, I want to be a role model and instil in Meredith that helping others is important.”

Dr Newport’s work has been funded by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.

On his first visit to the Middle East last month the new foreign secretary David Lammy announced another £5.5m worth of funding for UK-Med for their work in Gaza.

This lets medical volunteers like Dr Newport, who also works for the North West Air Ambulance, to carry on their work by ensuring their regular roles are backfilled, so the NHS is not impacted.

Dr Meredith performing life saving work (Image: Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office)

UK-Med is now running two FCDO-funded field hospitals, based in Al Mawasi and Deir El Balah, which have treated more than 100,000 patients hit by Israeli attacks in Gaza so far. 

Dr Newport said: “A lot had changed for my third deployment.

“We’d been forced to abandon the guest house we’d previously stayed in, as it was now outside the ‘humanitarian zone’ so were sleeping in tents in the hospital grounds.

“The vicious fighting in Rafah was within sight of our hospital.

“The sound of gunfire and explosions in neighbouring areas was our morning alarm clock and would continue throughout the day and night. It just became background noise. The devastation looked apocalyptic.

“You get used to waking up in the night to some really big bangs and the blast waves rattling the barbed wire around our compound, often followed by the wail of ambulance sirens. It became such a common occurrence you’d just go back to sleep.

UK-Med has been providing vital medical aid in Gaza (Image: Nq)

He added: “The local hospital staff have it much, much worse than us. I know I will be returning home to safety.

“They were coming down to the hospital each morning, often via donkey and cart from the tented displacement camps, and you can see the stress and fear in their eyes.

“I can’t imagine how they are finding the courage to come to work on the wards, let alone treat and care for upwards of 500 patients a day.”

More help for Palestinians hit by devastating Israeli military attacks could be on the way now that the UK has also lifted the pause on funding to the UN Relief and Works Agency.

This has released £21m to supply emergency food, shelter and other support for three million people, as well as its wider work supporting six million Palestinian refugees displaced by Israeli attacks across the region.

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Development Minister Anneliese Dodds also last week announced a £6m package for UNICEF.

This will help tens of thousands of Palestinians hit by the Israeli attacks in Gaza access food and water, as well as health, education and wellbeing services. 

Dr Newport has also supported staff at Al Aqsa hospital and played a key role establishing and developing the UK-Med emergency field hospital at Al Mawasi.

He said: “The unfortunate consequence of any conflict is that innocent civilians get caught up in it through absolutely no fault of their own.

“Hopefully one day my daughter Meredith will be proud that her daddy stood in solidarity with human beings who are suffering to show them they are not alone, and that people care.”