The American surgeon Nabeel Rana, who was working in hospitals in central and southern Mexico Loop throughout the month of October, describes “indiscriminate” Israeli attacks against the civilian population, improvised operating rooms and families with all their members wounded by shrapnel.
“These bombings against schools leave children in diapers with their limbs torn off, their abdomens open and their heads shattered. I’m sorry to be so graphic, but that’s what we see every day,” he explains. Nabeel Rana from North Carolina.
The Israeli Army, for its part, alleges that the educational centers (many of them converted into shelters for displaced Gazans) are used by the militants of Hamas as “command centers” to justify their attacks, but does not provide evidence.
“The indiscriminate death of innocent people (under the premise of being precise attacks) is absolutely incorrect and there is no way to modify this story to justify it,” laments this specialist in vascular surgery.
Coinciding with World Children’s Day, the Palestinian authorities denounced this Wednesday that almost 17,500 minors have already died in this war, and thousands more remain missing among tons of rubble. Among the verified deaths, there are 710 babies who never reached their first birthday.
Rana remembers, on his first summer trip to the Strip when he worked in the Al Aqsa hospitalin the central area of Deir al Balah, the case of a family whose mother had been wounded by shrapnel in the leg, which had torn her femoral artery.
“She only had one wound, but at the same time her three children were in the other three operating rooms: one, four and five years old. Each one also suffered from a single shrapnel wound in the abdomen,” recalls the doctor, who says that although the family was far from the bombing and did not show burns or multiple injuries, the so-called “dumb bombs” used by Israel still hit them.
Dead from five to nine years
This Monday, November 18, the head of Foreign Policy of the European Union, Josep Borrelldescribed the situation in Gaza as “apocalyptic” and stressed that children between five and nine years old are the most common age range among the thousands of deaths verified in Gaza between November and April 2024, according to a report published on November 7. by the UN Human Rights Office.
“This is a war against children. That is why I proposed the suspension of the association agreement with Israel,” added Borrell about the proposal (led by Madrid and Dublin) of “no dialogue” with Israel due to human rights violations in Gaza, which was rejected that same day by the member states.
At least 25,973 Gazans have been orphaned“forced to endure unimaginable suffering,” says the Palestinian Foreign Ministry.
Meanwhile, at an unprecedented rate (almost one death every two days, according to UN data), some 170 children have been murdered in the occupied West Bank, by Israeli troops or settlers, since October 7, 2023.
Ruqaya, a four-year-old girl
The youngest victim is four-year-old Ruqaya Ahmed Odeh Jahaleen, shot dead in January by Israeli forces as she waited with her mother to cross the military checkpoint in Beit Iksabetween Jerusalem and Ramallah.
According to the Army, a truck driver had tried to run over the soldiers, so they opened fire and killed the little girl in the next taxi.
For surgeon Rana, the fact that Gazans who manage to reach a hospital alive are being operated on in delivery rooms converted into operating rooms (“small rooms without surgical lights or surgical equipment”), while the world remains indifferent more than a year later is “something indescribable.”
“The death tolls are so large that they don’t even shock you, you can’t even assimilate them… What do they mean? We ask ourselves: how many children have been murdered? But seeing a single photo of an innocent child lying on the floor of a emergency room should be enough to stop this, and it’s not,” he laments.
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