Child amputees and Israel’s ‘unchilding’ reaches new depravity
By Helen McCue
Jan 17, 2024
Palestinian girl Eman Al-Kholi, whose limb was amputated after being wounded in an Israeli strike that killed her parents, is helped to drink water as she receives treatment at the European Hospital, in Rafah. More than 1,000 children have reportedly lost one or both legs since October 7. [Arafat Barbakh/Reuters] (Photo inserted)
As the International Court of Justice received submissions from South Africa and Israel on the 11th and 12th of January on the claims by South Africa of an intention to commit genocide by Israel in Gaza, some 20 Gazan children would have lost a limb, forever maimed and severely disabled.
Over 1,000 Gazan children have lost a limb, either one or two legs and or an arm since October 7th, making an horrific statistic – on average of 10 per day – as reported by Save the Children, and that number is growing daily.
An earlier Pearls and Irritations article identified the Israeli policy of ‘unchilding’, described by Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkain, a Hebrew University of Jerusalem law professor. This policy enables Israel to treat Palestinian children as . . .”dangerous and killable bodies needing to be caged and dismembered, physically and mentally”. This policy can be seen in all its horror and brutality in the physical dismembering of now over a thousand innocent children.
The World Health Organisation reports that many of these child amputations are, “done without anaesthetic, with the healthcare system in Gaza crippled by the conflict, and major shortages of doctors and nurses, and medical supplies like anaesthesia and antibiotics”.
Chris Hook has been working with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)/Doctors Without Borders since 2015. He was recently the Head of Medical Teams in Gaza and describes what it’s like to do care work in a city under siege. “Doctors working in Gaza currently are facing choices that no doctor should face. Several times a day, during mass casualty incidents, they find themselves having to step over the bodies of dead and dying children to save other children who have a chance at survival but may not survive. Having to treat these patients with limited resources in a resuscitation room full of badly injured, dead and dying children was one of the most brutal experiences of my medical career,” he said.
Very often children needing amputations require surgery that has to be done quickly, with many patients arriving at the hospital hourly, and surgery is also carried out sometimes on the floor and often in unhygienic conditions. Many of these child amputees will have to have repeated surgery because they are not getting adequate post operative care in the initial stages following the amputation. Also, they face the high risk of infection living on the street, or in tents if they are lucky, and wading through heavily polluted water on walking sticks or being carried.
Following such painful and brutal surgery children will require pain relief as well as adequate nutrition certainly not presently available. Reports indicate that 90% of Gazans are getting one meal if any per day and the whole population is on the verge of starvation. By way of explanation OCHA has raised the acute food insecurity index to Phase 5 (Catastrophic threshold) in the Gaza Strip and it warns that the risk of famine is increasing daily amid intense conflict and restricted humanitarian access. (OCHA Jan 10)
Children with amputations face long term care that is fraught and filled with pain and problems, as right now there are few if any services for the making and fitting of prostheses. Even before October 7th the quality of prosthetic care in Gaza was really underdeveloped and in need of improvement. And if a child is lucky enough to have a prosthesis it will need to be adjusted and repaired.
But this assault on children’s limbs is not new. Israeli snipers have intentionally maimed Palestinians protesting in Gaza over the past years, creating a generation of disabled youth and overwhelming the territory’s already crippled medical system. The UN reported more than 8,000 Palestinians were shot by Israeli security forces during the Great March of Return protest (2018-2019) on Gaza’s northern border and the majority of these cases were children and young people. Again in the May 2021 protests some 685 children were deliberately wounded. By the end of 2021 there were more than 1,700 people in Gaza having undergone amputation, most of these teenagers or children.
According to a United Nations inquiry released in March 2019 over 80 percent of the 6,106 protesters wounded in the first nine months of 2018-2019 were shot in the lower limbs. uring that conflict, where protesters were only throwing stones and burning tyres, the IDF deployed more than 100 snipers, called up from military units, primarily from the special forces and gave them live ammunition with clear orders to shoot specifically to injure and maim. There are reports that these snipers took bets on how many legs or knees they could shoot in a day…..some moral army.
Healthcare providers confirmed that the pattern of wounds shows that Israeli soldiers are purposefully shooting to maim protesters, most were children or young adults and who, as a result, require long-term medical care.
“The soldier knows exactly where he’s putting the bullet. This is not random. This is very intimate. This is very planned,” said Ghassan Abu Sitta, professor of surgery at the American University of Beirut (AUB), who treated injured protesters for three weeks at Gaza’s Al-Awda Hospital during these conflicts in 2018.
By now we are aware of the horrific death toll, injury rate and damage to infrastructure but it is worth repeating that overall, between 7 October and 9 January, at least 23,210 Palestinians were killed in Gaza and 59,167 were injured. And during the same period 9 ,600 children and 6,700 women have been killed. According to UNRWA nearly 85 per cent of the total population of Gaza, are now estimated to be internally displaced with at least 60% of housing destroyed. During the same period a total of 4,097 Palestinians, including 622 children, were injured in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
In addition to this horrific slaughter the brutal assault on teachers, students and educational infrastructure goes on and is not widely reported. By early January some 4,119 school students and 221 teachers have been killed, while 7,536 students and 703 teachers have been injured across the Gaza Strip. 90 per cent of all school buildings in Gaza are being used as shelters for Internally Displaced Persons and have sustained varying levels of damage with 99 schools sustained major damage and 12 were fully destroyed.
Israel continues to deny the delivery of sufficient medical supplies leaving five hospitals in northern Gaza without access to life-saving medical supplies and equipment impacting greatly on the many injured children. It also continues to daily bomb near, or at, other hospitals in the south of Gaza. At the same time, the continued denial of fuel delivery to water and sanitation facilities is leaving tens of thousands of people without access to clean water and increasing the risk of sewage overflows, significantly heightening the risk of the spread of communicable diseases with cases of diarrhoea in children up 50 per cent in just one week. And what of the hundreds if not thousands of orphan children and children with other disabilities. The mental health impact of the many wars in Gaza over the last 16 years, the life in a big prison, this horrific assault on their very existence must be extreme on these young people of Gaza.
The United Nations Security Council has noted “the disproportionate effect on children” and the Secretary General of the UN has described Gaza “as a graveyard for children” but the UNSC has continued to vote against the much needed ceasefire.
The Australian government has condemned attacks by the Houthi on international shipping but has failed to outright condemn Israel for the wholesale slaughter of Palestinian children, nor on Israel’s open policy of ‘unchilding’ and now the ongoing eminent danger of genocide.
While hundreds of thousands of people in Australia and millions overseas are regularly on the streets expressing their moral outrage, our government seems to be cringing behind the coat tails of the morally corrupt, militaristic USA while failing in its moral duty to us and indeed to the principles and laws of the United Nations at this critical moment in history.
Dr Helen McCue has previously worked as a consultant with the United Nations in the Middle East working with refugees and displaced. Dr McCue has been a strong advocate for Palestinian human rights including the rights of Palestinian refugees for over 40 years. she si the co-founder of Union Aid Abroad and former United Nations consultant.