Irish doctor on the horror of pronouncing four-month-old baby dead in Gaza

A consultant from the HSE South Hospital Group has spoken out about the horror of working in a hospital in Gaza where he had to spend 20 minutes pronouncing people, mostly children, dead.

Morgan McMonagle is Consultant Vascular and Trauma Surgeon at the HSE South Hospital Group (Waterford) and the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland but is currently working at Nasser Hospital in the Khan Yunis area of Gaza.

He told RTE Radio 1's Today with Claire Byrne Show about the horror unfolding in the hospital where the average age of people presenting with serious injures was between six and eight years of age. This follows the resumption of Israeli attacks on the city.

He said the youngest child he had to pronounce dead was around four months old.

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Speaking on the show, he said: "At one stage, I had to pick up a four-year-old boy who was severely injured and actually walk him up four flights of stairs to the operating room."

He went on to say that the latest figures they have shows that 40% of those killed in the last 24 hours were under the age of 14. 

Dr McMonagle said on Monday, he began operating on patients at around 2.45am and finished his last operation at 10pm that night such was the volume of critically injured people. He said in that time he personally performed around 16 to 20 operations.

"It's very difficult to keep count because you're literally running from one operating room to the next," he said.

"I believe over 70 people were brought straight to the mortuary. It's very difficult to bring children to the mortuary to they generally tend to come through the hospital, in which case you make a decision then."

He said shrapnel is the big enemy in hospitals because in some explosions you get thousands of pieces of shrapnel injuring people.

"You could look like you have very minor injuries on the outside, but you have very major injuries on the inside," he explained.

You can listen back to Dr McMonagle's full interview with Claire Byrne on the RTE Radio Player app or website.