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. aving 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........