First hand account from a Canadian doctor
Dr Fozia Alvi was making her rounds of the intensive care unit on her final day at the battered European public hospital in southern Gaza when she stopped next to two young arrivals with facial injuries and breathing tubes in their windpipes.
“I asked the nurse, what’s the history? She said that they were brought in a couple of hours ago. They had sniper shots to the brain. They were seven or eight years old,” she said.
The Canadian doctor’s heart sank. These were not the first children treated by Alvi who she was told were targeted by Israeli soldiers, and she knew the damage a single high-calibre bullet could do to a fragile young body.
“They were not able to talk, paraplegic. They were literally lying down as vegetables on those beds. They were not the only ones. I saw even small children with direct sniper shot wounds to the head as well as in the chest. They were not combatants, they were small children,” said Alvi.
Relief-web
For over a week now, the Israeli army has been conducting systematic and horrifying military operations inside and around Al-Shifa Medical Complex. These crimes include extrajudicial executions and deliberate killings of Palestinian civilians. The Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor field team has received identical testimonies about the killings and executions of Palestinian children between the ages of four and 16.
Some of the fatal shootings occurred during an Israeli army siege while the victims’ families were inside their homes; others occurred when the victims attempted to escape via routes that the Israeli army had designated as “safe” after forcibly evacuating them from their homes and places of residence.
UN report Nov 2023
In the Hamas-led October 7 attack on Israel, at least 33 children were killed, and Palestinian armed groups abducted an estimated 40 children as hostages.
In the face of mounting violations against children, international rights advocates recently called on UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to immediately add Israeli forces, the al-Qassam Brigades (Hamas’ armed wing), and Islamic Jihad to his “list of shame,” rather than wait until his regular annual report next year. The “list of shame” names governments and nongovernmental armed groups responsible for grave violations against children in armed conflict, including killing and maiming, abduction, attacks on schools and hospitals, and denial of humanitarian access.
Guterres on November 6 said that “Gaza is becoming a graveyard for children.” In the occupied West Bank, Israeli security forces and settlers have killed an additional 53 Palestinian children since October 7.
Israeli airstrikes have hit schools, hospitals, and ambulances in Gaza, resulting in civilian casualties. At least 300 schools have been damaged and 183 teachers killed. The World Health Organization has reported that at least 553 people have been killed in 178 attacks on medical facilities in Gaza between October 7 and November 21, and that the majority of hospitals in Gaza are no longer functional.
Israel’s blockade of water, food, medical supplies, electricity and fuel, and denial of all but a trickle of humanitarian assistance into Gaza amounts to collective punishment of the civilian population that poses further grave risks to children”
Of course this report of 4+months ago means that far more children have died since then.
