British medics on hand to help Gaza casualties

Shaker Abu Shawqah, wounded during a shelling in Nusseirat refugee camp in his legs and arm, rests in a basement of a building in Gaza City. Photo / AP

The 8-year-old boy's question seemed simple enough but was all the more tragically poignant for that.

"Why don't you have the lights on?" Mohammed Badran asked on waking up from reconstructive surgery carried out after an Israeli artillery shell struck the house where he slept and blew away most of his face.

"I couldn't explain it. I said it's just because you are recovering from surgery that we have the lights off," said Ghassan Abu Sitta, a British plastic surgeon who conducted the emergency procedure at Gaza City's Shifa Hospital.

In fact, Mohammed's life will be forever in darkness. He lost one eye and was blinded in the other in the July 31 strike on his home in the southern Gaza town of Nuseirat that also seriously wounded his 10-year-old sister, Hanan, and brother, Ebrahim, 12.

The boy's family is appealing for urgent action to transfer him to a British hospital capable of carrying out further surgery that is beyond the capacity of Gaza's drastically overstretched facilities.

Help may be at hand in the form of 15 National Health Service doctors and nurses being sent to Gaza with the support of the British Government in conjunction with Medical Aid for Palestinians (Map), a British charity.

The arrival of the team, which includes specialist physicians on the Government's International Emergency Trauma Register, was supposed to coincide with an expected end to the conflict between Israel and Hamas, which has killed about 1900 Palestinians - most of them civilians - and 67 Israelis, nearly all of them soldiers.

But hostilities continued yesterday. A Palestinian negotiator has said his team will quit Egyptian-brokered talks on a deal to end the Gaza war unless Israeli negotiators return to Cairo.

Israeli officials have said their negotiators, who left Cairo on Saturday, will not return as long as rocket fire from Gaza continues. Over the weekend, Gaza militants have fired dozens of rockets and mortar shells at Israel, the Israeli army said. Israeli warplanes pummelled Gaza with 50 air strikes that killed at least eight Palestinians.

Among the British medics will be neurosurgeons, anaesthetists, plastic surgeons, orthopaedic surgeons and trauma specialists all trained to deliver intensive care in disaster areas, says Tony Laurence, the chief executive of Map. It will also be charged with assessing which patients need to be allowed to leave Gaza to get further treatment - a category that likely includes Mohammed. He "needs what's called a fin flap microsurgery, where you take out a piece of bone and attach it to one of the arteries in the face," said plastic surgeon Dr Abu Sitta.

- additional reporting AP, AFP