The U.N. estimates that a thousand children in Gaza have become amputees since the conflict began in October. “This is the biggest cohort of pediatric amputees in history,” Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a London-based plastic-and-reconstructive surgeon who specializes in pediatric trauma, told me recently. I met him in the waiting room of his plastic-surgery clinic on London’s Harley Street, and we walked to a nearby pub for a glass of water. Abu-Sittah, a fifty-four-year-old British Palestinian with an angular face and tender, deep-set eyes, has treated child survivors of war for the past thirty years in Iraq, Yemen, Syria, and elsewhere.
In Gaza, Abu-Sittah was performing as many as six amputations a day. “Sometimes you have no other medical option,” he explained. “The Israelis had surrounded the blood bank, so we couldn’t do transfusions. If a limb was bleeding profusely, we had to amputate.” The dearth of basic medical supplies, owing to blockades, also contributed to the number of amputations. Without the ability to irrigate a wound immediately in an operating room, infection and gangrene often set in. “Every war wound is considered dirty,” Karin Huster, a nurse who leads medical teams in Gaza for Doctors Without Borders, told me. “It means that many get a ticket to the operating room.”
To mark the gravity of these procedures, and to mourn, Abu-Sittah and other medical staff placed the severed limbs of children in small cardboard boxes. They labelled the boxes with masking tape, on which they wrote a name and body part, and buried them. At the pub, he showed me a photograph he’d taken of one such box, which read, “Salahadin, Foot.” Some wounded children were too young to know their own names, he added, telling the story of an amputee who’d been pulled from rubble as the sole survivor of an attack.
@ISIDEWITH2mos2MO
@ISIDEWITH2mos2MO
Why do you think we often hear less about the personal tragedies of children in conflict areas compared to overall statistics?
@9L6JHG92mos2MO
It's tragic and disgusting. War is inhumane regardless of what it's for.
@9L6J4W9Republican2mos2MO
due to it being a sensitive topic that can spark conflicts
@ISIDEWITH2mos2MO
Can you imagine the emotional impact on a child who loses a limb in war, and how might this shape their future?
@9L6K682Republican2mos2MO
Could cause their life’s to be very different and not good
@9L6JGLR2mos2MO
War causes many tragedies and can be avoided
@P0l1t1calCharlieGreen2mos2MO
We paid for this. We are currently paying for this. And one day soon, we will pay for this.
@Unanim0usTealSocialist2mos2MO
I agree… And folks still wonder why 911 took place. We’ve done nothing either policy or action since to avoid what Al Qaeda & its affiliate ISIS-K has in store for us! We think in weeks, months, years…. The
@L3gis1ativeMonkeySocialist2mos2MO
How is the bombardment of Gaza still ongoing? How is there not more international outcry?
@C1vilRightsSavannahDemocrat2mos2MO
There's been lots of international outcry. Lots. But Hamas fights on. They use these children and their horrible suffering to torture all of us.
@PieMadelineRepublican2mos2MO
Here is an idea…. To stop all the death, injury and destruction in Gaza, Hamas could simply leave Gaza and the West Bank, especially if it actually cared about the Palestinians who have lived under their authoritarian rule since 2007. Iran would surely be happy to have them move there.
@9L6HRX8Independent2mos2MO
at least they are not dead, and besides this is war where people are dying in horrible ways because war is a horrible, terrible thing, we should be focused on ending the conflict which would stop anyone from being hurt or killed (the kids being amputated is still a horrible thing)
@QuaintKittenSocialist2mos2MO
Israel should be evacuating children like these to Israeli hospitals for treatment, along with pregnant women approaching childbirth. It should be aggressively trying to get food aid into Gaza, and restoring electricity and water delivery—even if those actions allow Hamas to fight more effectively.
The Israeli leadership's decisions on these topics, along with most of its rhetoric, couldn't be better designed to alienate Israel's allies if it was being directed by Hamas.
Ethnic cleansing Is real
Today my country went from condoning it by vetoing efforts to stop it to abstaining (looking the other way)
Our unconditional support for Israel is a stain on our greatness
@RightistSeafowlRepublican2mos2MO
Preceding WW2 Japan's median age was similar to that of Gaza, so < 18 were probably a similar % of the population. The bombing of Hiroshima alone killed ~66k, and there likely even more injured. So I think in all likelihood this is not "The biggest cohort of pediatric amputees in history". This is before one even gets into whether the UN is credible (I have my doubts).
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