Scots nurse saves Palestinian toddler with bullet lodged in neck in Gaza

‘It’s quite frankly a miracle they survived’

A Scottish nurse has told how he saved the life of a Palestinian toddler with a bullet lodged in her neck.

David Anderson, 55, from Montrose spent six months in Gaza working for the charity UK-Med as part of the UK Government’s humanitarian response to the Israel-Hamas war, and said he could never have imagined the horrors he witnessed.

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“You see so many difficult or dramatic injuries - arms, legs, multiple amputations, quite a lot of cases where bullets have ripped through the abdomen,” he said.

Nurse David AndersonNurse David Anderson
Nurse David Anderson | UK Foreign Office

“We treated a three-year-old girl with a bullet in her neck.

“The bullet had passed through the family’s makeshift tent, passed transversely through the mum’s hip then breast before lodging itself in the neck of the child.

“It’s quite frankly a miracle they survived and the bullet was lodged just millimetres from the little girl’s spinal cord.

“It took three hours of surgery to remove the bullet.

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A CT scan of Razan showing the bullet lodged in her neckA CT scan of Razan showing the bullet lodged in her neck
A CT scan of Razan showing the bullet lodged in her neck | Nasser Hospital

“It was only because it had gone through mum twice that the velocity had slowed sufficiently not to cause more serious damage to the child.”

Three-year-old Razan is now making a full recovery after the 7.92 millimetre bullet was removed, but Mr Anderson said her family’s story is “heart-breaking”.

He said: “They’d fled northern Gaza when their apartment was hit by an airstrike at the beginning of the war.

Little Razan holding the bullet that was surgically removed from her neck.Little Razan holding the bullet that was surgically removed from her neck.
Little Razan holding the bullet that was surgically removed from her neck. | UK Foreign Office

“They had to step over dead bodies as they made their way south and had been displaced three times by the time they finally reached Al Mawasi.

“They thought they had found safety - but they were wrong.”

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However he said not everyone was as lucky as Razan - he said often bystanders would come by with body parts they had found in the hopes they could be re-attached.

But the most difficult cases are when a child dies.

“I remember a seven-year-old kid. An uncle carried her in distraught but I would have defied the best trauma surgeon in the world to have saved them.

David Anderson pictured in GazaDavid Anderson pictured in Gaza
David Anderson pictured in Gaza | UK Foreign Office

“Every day is a horror in Gaza right now.”

Mr Anderson said the sound of bombs in Gaza became “background noise”.

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He added: “I wouldn’t say you get used to it because that would be an absolute lie, but you start to recognise what the different bangs or explosions are.

“The first time it happened, I found it a difficult thing to cope with - it’s terrifying.

David Anderson surveying the damage to Nasser Hospital in Gaza.David Anderson surveying the damage to Nasser Hospital in Gaza.
David Anderson surveying the damage to Nasser Hospital in Gaza. | UK Foreign Office

“I struggle to describe the feeling now but so many people have not been so lucky when bombs have landed.”

Mr Anderson said the ceasefire, which is due to take effect on Sunday, is a “hugely significant step”, but words the war has left millions of people in need of aid and a fragile healthcare system “in shambles”.

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Mr Anderson is now set to receive an OBE for services to the UK’s emergency health response overseas, having worked in Gaza, Lebanon and Ukraine, and in Sierra Leone during the 2014 Ebola outbreak. He has played a key role establishing two Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) funded emergency field hospitals – based in Al Mawasi and Deir El Balah – which have treated more than 350,000 patients.

The UK Government allocated £5.5million last year to UK-Med to fund their work in Gaza until April.

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