TWO British doctors who have spent time in Gaza’s war-torn and now largely destroyed hospitals, have condemned the British government’s false humanitarian facade while it continues to enable Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Dr James Smith, an emergency physician based in London, criticised the British government for using what he described as “the humanitarian alibi” to obscure its acts of “collusion and complicity” in the Israeli-led genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza.

Speaking during a June 8 online event hosted by Doctors Against Genocide, Smith noted that “recently the UK government has chosen to accept two children from Gaza, only two children. But they publicised this widely in the media. It was presented as a major humanitarian success story, all while the current Labour government in the UK has continued to maintain its military, financial, economic and diplomatic support to the Israeli regime.”

Smith also said that the early decision by “several large well-funded NGOs” not to work with the Gaza Ministry of Health had left the Palestinian population “entirely dependent on small field care hospitals on the beach that Israel can control while it bombs Ministry of Health hospitals. It’s a deliberate strategy.”

Dr Victoria Rose, a British plastic surgeon also based in London and who returned from the now besieged Nasser Hospital on June 3, warned that if the hospital is now attacked and forced to close, “everyone in ICU will die.”

She flew to Gaza to work at the European Gaza hospital, “but it was bombed the day I arrived,” she said. European Gaza has been taken over by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) and turned into a staging base for the military.

Rose warned that “anyone speaking to the British media this week needs to make it clear how many people are going to die if Nasser hospital closes.”

Nasser is the last remaining fully functional hospital in Gaza but is now surrounded by Israeli “red zones,” considered areas of severe risk due to active ground and air combat operations.

That has left just a handful of field hospitals run by international NGOs that have no hope of coping. “None of them have more than one or two theatres and none of them have the bed capacity, even combined, to take the number of patients at Nasser,” Rose said.

By this weekend, Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP) was reporting that the Israeli military had “issued forced displacement orders in the immediate areas surrounding the hospital. Israeli tanks and troops are reported to be within striking distance and hospital staff fear an imminent invasion.” MAP has called for the immediate protection of the hospital.

Dr Mohammad Saqr, director of nursing at Nasser Hospital, told MAP: “If we are forced to stop working, the healthcare system in southern Gaza will collapse entirely.” He warned that “The situation has reached a catastrophic level. We are resorting to placing patients in corridors and on balconies as a last resort, because we cannot turn our backs on them.”

Medecins Sans Frontieres has already pulled its team from the hospital after it became impossible to gets its personnel in or out.

Smith said that the Starmer government’s “overinflation of small acts of humanitarianism, or the pursuit of humanitarian aid, are used to deflect from the UK government’s broader political, legal and moral responsibilities to ensure that it ends its complicity in the genocide.”

He added that “the presence of international healthcare workers is a double-edged sword because Israel has used the visible presence of international NGOs and a small number of international healthcare workers as a core pillar of the case that it has taken to the International Court of Justice,” Smith said.

“It has claimed that it can’t be committing genocide against the Palestinian people because it is allowing humanitarian aid in and because it is permitting humanitarian organisations to function. The humanitarian presence is being used as a veil for the continuation of genocide and ethnic cleansing.”

The US-created Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) has militarised aid distribution, turning the operation into “a death trap” as Palestinians desperately seek food for their families, but instead find themselves ambushed in a shooting gallery.

“It’s not aid, it’s a trap for snipers who are enjoying killing,” said Dr Ahmad al-Farra, the head of paediatrics at Nasser Hospital who has personally witnessed the victims of the GHF operation.

Smith agreed. “More than 80 per cent of the entirety of the Gaza Strip is now entirely under Israeli military occupation or has been declared a red zone, which is effectively a space in which the Israeli soldiers are shooting to kill,” he said.

Dr Nidal Jboor, a co-founder of Doctors Against Genocide, and who is based in Michigan, accused the United States of creating “a death trap to lure starving children who are begging for bread to murder them in masses once they approach.”

Farra described the Nasser medical complex as “the last castle in the Gaza Strip,” now about to fall. Countless patients would be killed if the Israeli forces invade the hospital, he said. The first time Nasser Hospital was attacked “we evacuated to Rafah,” Farra said. “But now Rafah is completely destroyed.”

“We shouldn’t be lobbying to get more doctors and nurses in,” said Smith. “We need to be lobbying to bring an end to this madness.” Instead, he said, “humanitarian work is effectively being used as a substitute for the prevention and resolution of the genocide.”

Linda Pentz Gunter is a writer based in Takoma Park, Maryland.