Nizam Mahmud, a soft-spoken, retired transplant surgeon from England, spent August and September volunteering at Nasser Hospital in Central Gaza. When we crossed the border, the first thing was really a complete sense of shock. That's Mahmud last week, testifying before the UK's Parliamentary International Development Committee.
You see a landscape that looks as though it reminded me of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Devastation, buildings reduced to rubble for miles around as far as you can see. Nothing growing. No people, a few. Dr. Mahmood described the designated green zone.
And a large part of it comprises of tents. And when I say tents, some of those are proper tents. Many of them are just pieces of carpet and plastic stuck onto sticks. And these are in the middle of the road, side of the road, every possible space. There's no running water, no sanitation, no electricity, obviously.
At times, overcome by emotion. The doctor spoke about what he heard. Well, the sound is mainly of two things. One is drones. So there's constant drones. The drones existed before October last year. It's been a feature of Palestinian life for some time. But now the drones inspire fear, I think, and they inspire fear in me. He spoke about what he saw.
The drones would come down and pick off civilians, children. And we had description after description. This is not an occasional thing. This was day after day. He spoke about how those drones operated. The bullets that the drones fire are these small cuboid pallets. And I fished a number of those out of the abdomen of small children. I think the youngest I operated on was a three-year-old
And what that meant for the victims. And these pallets were in a way more destructive than bullets because with the drone pallets, what I found was they would go in and they would bounce around. So they would cause multiple injuries. So I had a seven-year-old boy, the one I described earlier, who gave a very clear description. He had a entry point here. He came in with a stomach hanging out of his chest. He had an injury to his liver, spleen.
The drones firing those bullets are a new kind of weapon of war in the Israeli arsenal, one with a gun and a camera attached that can shoot remotely. People in Gaza refer to it as a quadcopter.
This was day after day after day, operating on children who would say I was lying on the ground after Obama dropped, and this quadcopter came down and hovered over me and shot me. And that's clearly a deliberate act, and it was a persistent, persistent targeting of civilians.
Consider this, for months NPR has been collecting eyewitness accounts from Gaza that corroborate Dr. Mahmoud's testimony, saying the Israeli military has been using sniper drone technology and that they're not just shooting enemies, but also civilians. From NPR, I'm Mary Louise Kelly.
This message comes from Pushkin in a new episode of the Revisionist History Podcast, how a right-wing organization tried to take over the Parent Teacher Association in the 1960s. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
The election is over, but the story is just beginning. Listen to here and now anytime. We're talking to everyone, Democrats, Republicans, independents, covering the political stories that matter to you and your community. And we promise to bring you stories outside Washington, too. That's on here and now anytime, wherever you listen to podcasts.
What's good, Joe? It's Gene Dembe from Code Switch. And on Code Switch, we are deeply curious about race and identity and the way it shows up in the news headlines or in our personal lives. With the wide range of voices in front of and behind the mic, we see how race shows up all over the place. So come rock with us on the Code Switch podcast only from NPR.
It's considered this from NPR. Dr. Nizam Mahmoud told the UK Parliament that of all the conflicts he has worked in, including the Rwandan genocide, he has never seen anything like what is happening in Gaza. There just seems to be 1.4 million people trapped. They can't leave.
and having bombs dropped on them on a daily basis, and then drones coming in and shooting them. And there's plenty of evidence out there from Israeli soldiers that that's what's going on.
NPR spoke to several eyewitnesses who have seen the destruction that these drones can cause. NPR's Kat Lonsdorf has been reporting from Tel Aviv, and she takes the story from here. A warning, this piece includes the sound of gunfire. 37-year-old Fatma at the Amma is a freelance journalist from Jibalia in northern Gaza. It's an area that has been besieged by Israeli forces since early October. At the Amma sent NPR voice notes from her home there on October 9th.
Hi, how are you? She starts. Israeli tanks are closing in, she says, and the army is nearby. Suddenly, she's interrupted. Ah, hear that? She says, that's the quadcopter. It's what many in Gaza call the small hovering drone with a rifle mounted underneath. If I try to go closer to the door to get better service, she says,
the quadcopter starts shooting and I have to go back inside. It's very dangerous. The whole town is under siege by the shooting quadcopter drones. She says no one can move. For months, NPR has collected accounts for more than a dozen people in Gaza who say they've seen these sniper drones and that they've seen them used to shoot and sometimes kill civilians.
55-year-old Adib Shakfam says he was walking with his 32-year-old son on May 31 in Rafa in southern Gaza. Shakfam says it was a quiet day and there was no fighting nearby. When suddenly, a drone appeared and shot his son who was walking up ahead. He says two men rushed in to help his son and they were also shot.
Two older women nearby were also shot in the head, he says. She says the women were killed, so was his son. The Israeli military told NPR it's unaware of this incident and that any suggestion that it intends to harm civilians is quote unfounded and baseless. NPR also asked the Israeli military repeatedly, if it was using the sniper drone technology in Gaza, it did not respond to the question.
Israel, frankly, like many militaries, is very cautious about what kinds of information it provides about its operations and tactics that it uses. Seth Jones is president of the Defense and Security Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. But also makes it more difficult for everyday Israelis or journalists or other researchers to understand how these things are being used.
Further complicating that understanding, until recently Israel had a censorship law in place forbidding the media from reporting on armed drone use by the military. And it's something most journalists can't witness with their own eyes. Israel has not allowed outside journalists independent access to Gaza since the war began more than a year ago. But we do know that this sniper drone technology exists and that the Israeli military has it.
This is a video from 2018 by Duke Robotics Incorporated. For a small drone they call... T-CAD. T-CAD. The future soldier.
which can be outfitted with several different firearms, robots are replacing combat soldiers, and shoot while it hovers, adjusting for the recoil of the weapon. The company is in the process of implementing orders from Israeli forces. Duke Robotics is based in Florida in the US, but was established by veterans of several Israeli Special Forces units.
Around that same time, Israel's defense ministry released a video showing off new technology, including soldiers controlling one of Duke's sniper drones remotely and firing at targets at an outdoor shooting range. Then, in 2021, Duke Robotics joined with an Israeli company, Elbit Systems, specifically to further develop the teacad drone and market it globally.
And there are other sniper drones in the market too, also by Israeli companies. In 2022, a company called Smart Shooter, based in Northern Israel, announced a drone called Smash Dragon. In this YouTube video posted by the company, a small drone with a rifle barrel attached takes flight. The video then zooms in through the viewfinder to show the drone locking in on a human-shaped target before taking a shot.
Smart Shooter denies that their Smash Dragon drone is being used by the Israeli military, but Israeli forces have touted using their technology in the past, and other products by the company are partially funded by Israel's Defense Ministry research and development. On Smart Shooter's website, it says it uses artificial intelligence and machine learning technology to provide, quote, one-shot, one-hit precision.
I would argue we're reaching a point where there are increasingly diminished human oversight over the practice of killing in war and also the decision-making process around who lives or dies.
James Rogers is an expert on drone warfare and emerging technologies at Cornell University. He points out that precision can be good, but... No matter how precise your weapon systems are, if your intelligence is wrong, then all that precision, that guaranteed destruction of the target means, is the guaranteed death of the wrong person. The gunshot of the quadcopter has a special sound, has a special sound.
Dr. Ahmad Mugrabi is a head surgeon at Nasser Hospital in central Gaza. He says he's treated many people shot by the sniper quadcopter drone. They used to shoot at displaced people inside the hospital and they killed many people actually. Back in early February, Nasser Hospital was a focus of the Israeli military saying Hamas fighters were hiding there. On February 1, Dr. Mugrabi says he and his co-worker, a male nurse, stepped out onto a balcony after finishing a long surgery.
A drone shot the nurse in the chest. Dr. Mugrabi sent us a video he filmed that day. Colleagues rushed the nurse into an operating room, as blood blooms around a bullet wound on his right chest.
Quickly, quickly, Dr. Mugrabi says, as others cut away the nurse's clothing to operate. The nurse survived. The Israeli military told NPR it was unaware of this incident as well.
Here are just a few of the other stories we heard. Several people we talked to in Beitleje North described sniper drones recently shooting at civilians as they rushed to help pull people from the rubble after an Israeli airstrike leveled a building full of families. One man said a sniper drone entered his house with his family inside, started shooting, forcing them to flee. One doctor from the UK described sniper drones firing on people as they tried to enter a hospital in Gaza City where he was working.
He told NPR he saw more than 20 injuries in one day from the drones, including one child shot in the neck who later died. Although there's been very little reporting on these drones, people in Gaza talk about them a lot. Most people we talk to brought up these attacks off-handedly. Sniper drones seem to have become so common in the war.
And, as Seth Jones points out, once technology exists, it rarely goes away. The reality is, is this is an evolution in the character of war. So, I don't think we're going to turn around and go the other direction. This might very well be the future of warfare.
That was NPR's Kat Londstorff. This episode was produced by Lauren Hodges and Brianna Scott. It was edited by James Heider and Courtney Dorning. Our executive producer is Sammy Yinnigan. It's considered this from NPR. I'm Mary Louise Kelly. How much can one person change in four years? The answer comes down to who he puts in charge.
Trump's terms is a podcast where you can follow NPR's coverage of the people who will shape Donald Trump's first 100 days in office and what their goals are. We will track his cabinet picks, his political team, his top military leaders to understand who they are, what they believe, and how they'll govern. Listen to Trump's terms from NPR. Arguments happen. And our body's automatic response to conflict doesn't always help. We may start to feel anxious or angry, making it even more difficult for us to see eye to eye.
Over time, that becomes contempt, and contempt is a very destructive interpersonal process.
