Crippling Those Who Survive

GPM # 98

Israel-USA’s genocidal war on Gaza has just entered its 21st month.

According to Gaza health officials, almost 55,000 have been killed since the war began (the actual number may be two or three times higher), and 125,000 have been injured, with fewer and fewer places to seek care.

Gaza’s health system — among the region’s most functional, before the war — has been laid to waste. Hospitals, clinics, emergency rescue vehicles and health care personnel are perfectly legitimate targets, Israel says, insisting that it’s operating squarely within the bounds of international law.

Of the 36 hospitals operating in Gaza before October 2023, seventeen are now in partial operation. Seven out of fifteen field hospitals, 61 out of 160 primary health centres, and 127 out of 353 mobile clinics are partially functional.

Gaza’s kids are suffering the most. The tiny enclave, under comprehensive Israeli siege since 2007, is now reportedly home to the largest cohort of child amputees in the world.

“Gaza has become a graveyard for thousands of children,” UNICEF spokesperson James Elder said, at the end of October 2023. In late May, UNICEF reported that fifteen thousand Gazan kids have been killed, over 34,000 injured, and nearly a million deprived of their right to basic services.

Last week, the GPM reported on a People’s Tribunal on the Gaza genocide, held in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The three-day hearing featured scores of witness accounts and testimony. Among the most gripping, accounts from two physicians who’ve worked in Gaza hospitals.

Dr. Mimi Syed is an American board-certified emergency medicine physician. She served in Gaza from August to September 2024, and in December 2024, at both Al-Aqsa and Nasser Hospitals.

Dr. Thaer Ahmad is an emergency medicine physician at Advocate Christ Medical Center in Chicago, and an Assistant Clinical Professor at the University of Illinois. He spent time at Nasser Hospital, in Khan Younis, just north of Rafah, the last remaining referral hospital in south Gaza.

Listen to Mimi Syed and Thaer Ahmad in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

The official death toll in Gaza now stands at 55,000.

According to a pair of reports last year in the British medical journal The Lancet, the number may be much higher.

Before the war, Gaza’s population was pegged at 2.3 million. These days, mainstream media talk about 2.1 million Gazans. What happened to the remaining 200,000?

Fifty to seventy-five thousand have likely been blown to bits by US bombs and missiles, many of them now buried under vast piles of rubble.

Another 150,000 have presumably died from grave injuries, or from wound infection, infectious disease in fetid refugee encampments (that Israel incessantly bombs), chronic ailments that can no longer be treated, due to Israel’s blockade on drugs and vital equipment, and from starvation.

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As awful as these figures are, worse is surely in store for little Gaza.

Nearly half of Gaza’s population are children. Those who survive, deeply traumatized, will carry both physical and psychological scars for the rest of their lives. Many now face a life of disability, without social or economic supports, under permanent military occupation and siege the international community has shown no interest in ending.

If they bear children, their children will too, and their children’s children.

A “pandemic of disabilities,” the Commissioner General of UNRWA, the UN Relief & Works Agency, called this.

Late last month, at the Gaza Tribunal, in Sarajevo, British scholar Penny Green spoke about the “disabling” tactics Israeli Occupation Forces have deployed over the course of the last 21 months in Gaza. Green is Professor of Law and Globalisation at Queen Mary University of London, and the acting chair of the Gaza Tribunal.

Listen to Penny Green in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.