'After the things I'd seen, I couldn't bring myself to pick up my own daughter from nursery'

An air strike hit Khan Younis on July 7. In the course of two hours, 30 trauma patients were brought to Dr Matt Newport's emergency department.

When the dust had settled, there were seven bodies in the mortuary. One was a young boy who had been shot through the heart. He was dead on arrival.

The child’s father was brought in with him, near-death, after a bullet to the head. Dr Newport couldn't look.

“Shamefully, I avoided eye contact with the mother of the family, not knowing if I could hold it together while thinking of my own wife and two-year-old daughter back in the UK,” he told the MEN.

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He knows these children are just like his own daughter. They want to laugh, play and explore the world.

But his own children are safe at home in Ramsbottom, Bury. The children whose lives he is trying to save are in Gaza, they have "injuries that you simply don’t see in the UK".

Dr Newport normally works for East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust at Blackburn and Burnley Teaching Hospitals, as well as the North West Air Ambulance. He has just returned to that day job after a month at the centre of the Israel-Gaza conflict.

After a third life-saving visit to the region's field hospitals - all flooded with the war-wounded - he returned home once again reeling from horror that sees him hug his two-year-old girl a little tighter every day.

“It’s the huge number of wounded children and women that has left a real impact on me - right down to babies just a day or two old and weighing just a couple of kilograms,” said Dr Newport. “As a first-time father of a two-year-old, seeing displaced, frightened, parentless, and