- LONDON, UK — AUG. 18, 2025: Derrick Pounder, one of the UK’s leading forensic pathologists, has spent his career uncovering the evidence of political violence, from deaths in custody to war crimes investigations for Amnesty International.

The British forensic expert, who is now retired but continues to advise international media on conflicts, says Israel’s war on Gaza is unlike anything he has ever seen in more than five decades in the field.

“I first visited Israel and the occupied (Palestinian) territories when I was 21 years of age, and that's 55 years ago … I went back in the 1990s for individual deaths in custody or people shot by the military, assisting human rights organizations,” Pounder told Anadolu.

“What I see in Israel and the occupied territories is a deeper and deeper tragedy. It seems that we’ve not just gone round in a circle, but gone round in a deepening spiral of oppression and misery and abuse. I don’t know where it will end, but we are reaching close to the very bottom – the base of what one people can do to another.”

Since October 2023, Israel’s assault on Gaza has killed more than 62,100 Palestinians and created famine conditions that, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, have caused at least 271 deaths from starvation and malnutrition.

“I think that the people of Israel will carry a burden on their conscience for a very long time because of this,” Pounder said, warning that the devastation lies not only in the death toll but also in the collapse of accountability.

“There are so many deaths and so many incidents which are raised as potential war crimes. It’s impossible to investigate them. All this is on a scale which is beyond the investigative capabilities of the Israeli authorities … even if they were motivated to do it.”

That impossibility, he added, is compounded by the absence of foreign scrutiny. “There are … no foreign journalists to document what’s going on. So, what we have is a screen through which we can partly see the truth – the part that we see is horrific, and the whole truth must be far worse. Otherwise, Israeli authorities would have no reason to prohibit foreign journalists from entering Gaza.”

- Israeli ‘targeted sniper fire’ killing Palestinian children

According to Gaza’s Government Media Office, at least 18,885 children are among the tens of thousands killed by Israeli forces.

Pounder recently assisted in a BBC investigation into more than 160 cases of Israeli forces shooting Palestinian children. The findings were stark: in 95 cases, the victims – most under 12 years old – were shot in the head or chest.

He recalled analyzing footage of a 2-year-old Palestinian girl and her father, killed by an Israeli sniper: “We see a man on the street lying on his back, fully extended and face up, and by his right-hand side, we see a small child … The child doesn’t move in the video and is presumably dead … But the man makes some movement with his right hand, indicating that he’s still alive, so we’re witnessing the dying moments of a man who’s lying alongside a dead child.”

From the bodies’ positions, Pounder concluded they were likely killed by a single sniper’s shot. “The body position of the child suggests that the child was wrapped around the chest of the man … So, it seems that they’ve both been shot … The bullet has probably gone through the child and through the adult, so they’ve probably both been killed by a single bullet – and that suggests … targeted sniper fire.”

- Need for forensic access

On the issue of accountability, Pounder underscored the role of independent mechanisms such as the International Criminal Court (ICC).

“Forensic experts can only support the international justice system, so until the ICC accesses Gaza with its forensic experts, until NGOs … enter Gaza and can investigate, until international journalists can enter Gaza and investigate, there is little forensic evidence that we can gather,” he said.

But even international courts, he cautioned, would be overwhelmed by the scale. “There are so many deaths, it would overwhelm the international system. What would need to happen would be to target very specific incidents where there is good background information, good eyewitness accounts, and then look for corroboration of those accounts in the forensic evidence.”

“Forensic evidence is supportive … So, the ultimate determination of where you use forensics is made by the legal investigators, who in this case I would hope, would be the ICC.”