OBE for Angus nurse in recognition of medical service overseas

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.

“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.

“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.

“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.

“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.

Mr Anderson added: “They thought they had found safety - but they were wrong.”

However he said not everyone was as lucky as Razan - bystanders would often 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.

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

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

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. 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 is a “hugely significant step”, but the war has left millions of people in need of aid and a fragile healthcare system “in shambles”.

Mr Anderson will 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 played a key role establishing two Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) funded emergency field hospitals – 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.