This is Gaza

I have no idea why Politico published this article, but this describes the medical conditions in Gaza and is horrifying. This is the story of two surgeons who went to Gaza to volunteer.

Do read it, not to glorify the violence but to know what it is.

“In the operating room, we examined Juri from head to toe. This beautiful, meek little girl was missing two inches of her left femur along with most of the muscle and skin on the back of her thigh. Both of her buttocks were flayed open, cutting so deeply through flesh that the lowest bones in her pelvis were exposed. As we swept our hands through this topography of cruelty, maggots fell in clumps onto the operating room table.

“Jesus Christ,” Feroze muttered as we washed the larvae into a bucket, “she’s just a fucking kid.”

“While touring the hospital we walked through one of the ICUs and found multiple preteens admitted with gunshot wounds to the head. One might argue that a child could have been injured unintentionally in an explosion, or perhaps even forgotten when Israel invaded a children’s hospital and reportedly left infants to die in a pediatric intensive care unit.

Gunshot wounds to the head are an entirely different matter.”

We started seeing a series of children, preteens mostly, who’d been shot in the head. They’d go on to slowly die, only to be replaced by new victims who’d also been shot in the head, and who would also go on to slowly die. Their families told us one of two stories: the children were playing inside when they were shot by Israeli forces, or they were playing in the street when they were shot by Israeli forces.

(The Israel Defense Forces did not respond to specific questions for this story, but in an emailed statement, it said, “The IDF is committed to mitigating civilian harm during operational activity. In that spirit, the IDF makes great efforts to estimate and consider potential civilian collateral damage in its strikes.”)”

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/07/19/gaza-hospitals-surgeons-00167697

Patrice from the Greanville Post has the full piece up and says this was one of the hardest articles to edit in a very long time. https://www.greanvillepost.com/2024/07/25/politico-does-journalism-we-volunteered-at-a-gaza-hospital-what-we-saw-was-unspeakable/