DAILY TRIFECTA: Gaza's Children
"What's important is the quantity; it's children and again children and once more children." - Dr. Lee Mordechai
TITLE: Ailing kids wait months for Israeli permission to leave Gaza for treatment. Some die in the meantime
https://apnews.com/article/gaza-medical-evacuation-israel-children-dead-7ad6294bd10970e57b35e6e26bc6fa7b
EXCERPTS: The 12-year-old Palestinian boy was lying in a hospital bed in central Gaza, wracked with leukemia, malnourished and whimpering in pain despite the morphine doctors were giving him, when Rosalia Bollen, a UNICEF official, said she saw him in late October.
Islam al-Rayahen’s family had asked Israeli authorities six times over the past months for permission to evacuate him from Gaza for a desperately needed stem cell transplant, Bollen said. Six times, the request was refused for unexplained security reasons, she said.
Islam died three days after she saw him, Bollen said.
Thousands of patients in Gaza are waiting for Israeli permission for urgently needed medical evacuation from Gaza for treatment of war wounds or chronic diseases they can’t get after the destruction of much of the territory’s health care system by Israel’s 15-month military campaign.
Among them are at least 2,500 children who UNICEF says must be transported immediately.
“They cannot afford to wait. These children will die. They’re dying in waiting and I find it striking that the world is letting that happen,” Bollen said.
The Israeli military often takes months to respond to medical evacuation requests, and the number of evacuations has plunged in recent months. In some cases, the military rejects either the patient or, in the case of children, the caregivers accompanying them on vague security grounds or with no explanation.
The Israeli decisions appear to be “arbitrary and are not made on a criteria nor logic,” said Moeen Mahmood, the Jordan country director for Doctors Without Borders.
COGAT, the Israeli military agency in charge of humanitarian affairs for Palestinians, said in a statement to The Associated Press that it “makes every effort to approve the departure of children and their families for medical treatments, subject to a security check.” It did not respond when asked for details about Islam’s case.
A military official said Israel’s internal intelligence service reviews whether the patient or their escort have what he called “a connection to terrorism,” and if one is found they are refused. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss confidential procedures.
Osaid Shaheen, who is nearly 2, now faces having his eyes removed after Israel rejected his evacuation for treatment of cancer in his retinas.
The toddler was diagnosed with the cancer in April, after his mother, Sondos Abu Libda, noticed his left eyelid was droopy. The World Health Organization requested his evacuation through the Rafah border crossing in southern Gaza, but the crossing was shut down in May when Israeli troops took it over in an offensive, Abu Libda said.
WHO applied again, this time for Osaid to leave through the Kerem Shalom crossing into Israel, now the only route for evacuees to travel. During the long wait, the cancer spread to the child’s other eye and reached stage 4.
In November, Abu Libda was told Osaid was rejected on security grounds with no further explanation.
She was stunned, she said. “I didn’t expect that a child could get a security rejection.”
Doctors have given the boy three doses of chemotherapy. But with supplies short in Gaza, they’re struggling to get more. If they can’t, they will have to remove Osaid’s eyes or the cancer will spread to other parts of his body, Abu Libda said.
“He’s just a child. How will he live his life without seeing? How will he play? How will he see his future and how will his life turn out?” Abu Libda asked, standing outside the house where her family is sheltering in the Beni Suheil district of southern Gaza.
Nearby, little Osaid — who so far still has his sight — toddled around in the rubble of a building destroyed by Israeli forces, smiling as he played with chunks of rubble. When asked about his case, COGAT did not reply.
Doctors without Borders said in August, it sought to evacuate 32 children along with their caregivers, but only six were allowed to leave. In November, it applied for eight others, including a 2-year-old with leg amputations, but Israeli authorities blocked evacuation, it said
The military official said five of the eight requests in November were approved but the caregivers trying to travel with the children were rejected on security grounds. The official said Doctors Without Borders would have to resubmit the requests with alternate escorts. The official didn’t say why the other three children weren’t approved.
The rejected caregivers were the children’s mothers and grandmothers, said Mahmood, the Doctor’s Without Borders official, who said no explanation was given for the security concern.
Asma Saed said she has been waiting for three months to hear whether her 2-year-old son, Al-Hassan, can travel for treatment for kidney failure. In the meantime, they are living in a squalid tent camp in Khan Younis, with little clean water or food.
She said her son doesn’t sleep, screaming all night.
“I wish I could see him like any child in the world who can move, walk, and play,” she said. “He’s a child, he can’t express his pain.”
TITLE: Death feels imminent for 96% of children in Gaza, study finds
https://aoav.org.uk/2024/death-feels-imminent-for-96-of-children-in-gaza-study-finds/
EXCERPTS: A landmark study conducted by the Community Training Centre for Crisis Management in Gaza, with backing from the Dutch Relief Alliance and the War Child Alliance, has laid bare the harrowing psychological toll of Israel’s ongoing military operation on Gaza’s youngest population. The findings are harrowing: 96% of children surveyed feel their death is imminent, while 49% have expressed a desire to die.
The assessment surveyed the caregivers of 504 children, all of whom are from families with at least one child who is disabled, injured, or unaccompanied. The survey’s findings, based on data collected in June, suggest that the true extent of the psychological harm is likely even greater now, following 14 additional months of sustained conflict.
Helen Pattinson, chief executive of War Child UK, called the report “one of the most horrifying insights into the mental well-being of children anywhere in the world.” She noted that Gaza’s children are bearing the brunt of a war they had no role in starting, suffering from both the destruction of physical infrastructure and the psychological scars left by war’s brutality.
The survey found that 92% of children were “not accepting of reality”, 79% suffered from nightmares, and 73% displayed symptoms of aggression. Other psychological responses included fear, anxiety, social withdrawal, and difficulty concentrating.
The trauma has left many children with ongoing emotional distress, behavioural changes, and eating issues, while physical symptoms such as pain are also manifesting.
The war’s impact is compounded by the destruction of homes, schools, and hospitals. Over 60% of the children surveyed had been exposed to at least one traumatic event, and some experienced multiple instances of violence, including airstrikes, displacement, and separation from their families. An estimated 17,000 children in Gaza are unaccompanied, separated from their parents due to the conflict.
Dr Iain Overton, Executive Director of AOAV, commented on the findings: “The harm caused to Gaza’s children goes beyond statistics. Behind every number is a name, a life, and a future that is being extinguished before it can even begin. The use of explosive weapons in populated areas inflicts lasting psychological and physical wounds on children that cannot be undone.”
TITLE: A Massive Database of Evidence, Compiled by a Historian, Documents Israel's War Crimes in Gaza
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-12-05/ty-article-magazine/.highlight/massive-database-of-evidence-compiled-by-a-historian-details-israels-war-crimes-in-gaza/00000193-979b-d408-a7d3-bfdbf1410000
EXCERPTS: Lee Mordechai, 42, a former officer in the IDF Combat Engineering Corps, is presently a senior lecturer in history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, whose expertise is human and natural disasters in the ancient and medieval eras. He has written about the Justinianic plague in the 6th century and the volcanic winter that struck the northern hemisphere in 536 C.E. He approached the subject of the Gaza disaster in an academic-historical way, with dry prose and few adjectives, availing himself of the greatest possible diversity of primary sources; his writing is devoid of interpretation and open to review and revision.
The report Dr. Mordechai has compiled online – "Bearing Witness to the Israel-Gaza War" – constitutes the most methodical and detailed documentation in Hebrew (there is also an English translation) of the war crimes that Israel is perpetrating in Gaza. It is a shocking indictment comprised of thousands of entries relating to the war, to the actions of the government, the media, the Israel Defense Forces and Israeli society in general. The English translation of the seventh, and to date latest version of the text, is 124 pages long and contains over 1,400 footnotes referencing thousands of sources, including eyewitness reports, video footage, investigatory materials, articles and photographs.
For example, there are links to texts and other kinds of testimony describing acts attributed to IDF soldiers who were seen "shooting civilians waving white flags, abuse of individuals, captives and corpses, gleefully damaging or destroying houses, various structures and institutions, religious sites and looting personal belongings, as well as randomly firing their weapons, shooting local animals, destroying private property, burning books within libraries, defacing Palestinian and Islamic symbols (including burning Qurans and turning mosques into dining spaces)."
A soldier is seen forcing bound and blindfolded prisoners to send regards to his family and to say they want to be its slaves. Soldiers are photographed holding stacks of money they plundered from Gazan homes. An IDF bulldozer is seen destroying a large pile of food packages from a humanitarian-aid agency. A soldier sings the children's ditty "Next year we'll burn the school" – while a school is seen in flames in the background. And there are plenty of clips of soldiers modeling women's underwear that they looted.
The links in "Bearing Witness to the Israel-Gaza War" also lead to graphic footage of bodies strewn about, in every possible condition; of people crushed under rubble; of puddles of blood; and of the cries of people who lost their entire families in an instant. There are items attesting to the killing of disabled people, humiliation and sexual assaults, the torching of homes, forced starvation, random shooting, looting, abuse of corpses and much more.
A perusal of Mordechai's report helps to disperse the fog that has blanketed Israelis since the war broke out. A case in point is the number of fatalities: The October 7 war is the first war in which Israel is not making any effort at all to tally the number of those killed on the other side. In the absence of any other source, many people around the world – foreign governments, media outlets, international organizations – rely on the reports of the Palestinian Health Ministry – Gaza, which are believed to be quite credible. Israel tries to make a point of denying the ministry's figures. Local media outlets usually note that the source of such data is "Hamas' Ministry of Health."
However, few Israelis know that not only do the IDF and the government of Israel not have their own, alternative figures regarding the number of fatalities, but that senior Israeli sources, lacking no other data, end up effectively confirming that published by the ministry in Gaza. How senior? Benjamin Netanyahu himself. On March 10, for example, the prime minister stated in an interview that Israel had killed 13,000 armed Hamas militants and estimated that for every one of them, 1.5 civilians had been killed. In other words, up to that point, between 26,000 and 32,500 people had been killed in the Strip. On that day, the Palestinian ministry issued a figure of 31,112 fatalities in Gaza, within the range cited by Netanyahu. At the end of that month, Netanyahu spoke of 28,000 dead – about 4,600 fewer than the official Palestinian figure. In late April, The Wall Street Journal quoted an estimate by high-ranking IDF officers that the number of dead was approximately 36,000 – more than the number published by the Palestinian ministry at the time.
Mordechai: "It seems as if, on the Israeli side, they're choosing not to deal with the figures, although Israel could ostensibly do it – the technology exists, and Israel controls the Palestinian Population Registry. The defense establishment also has facial images; they could cross-check them and see that someone who may have been reported dead has gone through a checkpoint. Come on, show me! Give me proof and I will change my approach. It will make my life more complicated, but I will be a lot less upset.
In his report, he quotes Palestinian ministry's figures that cite – among those killed from the time the war broke out, up until this past June – 273 employees of the UN and aid organizations, 100 professors, 243 athletes, 489 health workers (including 55 specialist physicians), 710 children under the age of one year and four preemies who died after the IDF forced the male nurse who was caring for them to leave the hospital. The nurse was caring for five preemies and decided to save the one who looked as if he would have the best chance to survive. The decaying bodies of the other four were found in incubators two weeks later.
The footnote in Mordechai's text dealing with those infants does not reference a tweet by a Gazan or a pro-Palestinian blog, but an investigation by The Washington Post. Israelis who may question "Bearing Witness to the Israel-Gaza War" on the grounds that it relies on social media or on unverified reports must realize that it is also based on dozens of investigations by almost every self-respecting Western media outlet. Numerous outlets have examined incidents in Gaza using rigorous journalistic standards – and came up with evidence of atrocities. A CNN investigation corroborated the Palestinian claim about the "flour massacre," in which about 150 Palestinians who arrived to collect food from an aid convoy on March 1 were killed. The IDF declared that it was the crowding and stampeding of the Gazans themselves that killed them, not warning shots fired by soldiers in the area. Ultimately, CNN's investigation, based on careful analyses of documentation and 22 interviews with eyewitnesses, found that most of the fatal casualties indeed stemmed from the shooting.
The New York Times, ABC, CNN, the BBC, international organizations and the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem published results of their own investigations of incidents of torture, abuse, rape and other atrocities perpetrated against Palestinian detainees in the IDF's Sde Teiman base in the Negev and other facilities. Amnesty International examined four incidents in which there was no military target or justification for attack, in which IDF forces killed a total of 95 civilians.
An investigation in late March by Yaniv Kubovich in Haaretz showed that the IDF created "kill zones" in which many civilians were shot after crossing an imaginary line demarcated by a field commander; the victims were categorized as terrorists after their death. The BBC has cast doubt on the IDF's estimates of the number of terrorists its forces have killed in general; CNN reported extensively about one incident in which an entire family was wiped out; NBC investigated an attack on civilians in so-called humanitarian zones; The Wall Street Journal verified that the IDF was relying on reports of fatalities in Gaza that were published by the Palestinian Health Ministry; AP claimed in a detailed report that the IDF had presented only one reliable piece of evidence showing that Hamas was operating on the grounds of a hospital – the tunnel that was discovered in the yard of Shifa Hospital; The New Yorker and The Telegraph published the results of extensive investigations of cases involving children whose limbs had to be amputated, and there is much more – all of it mentioned in "Bearing Witness."
Not included is a report published just this week by the Palestinian Health Ministry – Gaza, stating that since October 7, 1,140 families have been totally wiped out of the local population registry – most likely victims of aerial bombings.
Mordechai cites numerous items relating to the IDF's lax rules of engagement in the Gaza Strip. One clip shows a clutch of refugees with a woman in the front, holding her son in one hand and a white flag in the other; she is seen being shot, probably by a sniper, and collapsing as the child drops her hand and flees for his life. Another incident, widely reported in late October, shows 13-year-old Mohammed Salem crying for help after being wounded in an air force attack; when people approach to offer aid, they are targeted by another such attack. Salem and another youngster were killed, and over 20 people were wounded.
Mordechai acknowledges that watching the visual testimony from the war has hardened his heart – today he can view even the most awful scenes. "When the ISIS videos were posted [years ago], I didn't watch them. But here I have felt that it's my obligation, because this is being done in my name, so I must see it in order to convey what I've seen. What's important is the quantity; it's children and again children and once more children."
Mordechai rejects out of hand the commonly heard claim by Israelis that what is happening in Gaza isn't so terrible when compared to other wars. "Bearing Witness" shows, for example, that more children have been killed in Gaza than all the children in all the wars in the world in the three years preceding the October 7 war. Already in the first month of the war the number of dead children was 10 times greater than the number of those killed in the Ukraine war over the course of a year.
More journalists have been killed in Gaza than in all of World War II. According to an investigation that Yuval Avraham published on the Sicha Mekomit (Local Call) website, about the AI systems used in IDF bombing campaigns in Gaza, authorization was given to kill up to 300 civilians in order to assassinate high-ranking Hamas figures. By comparison, documents reveal that for America's armed forces that figure stood at one-10th of that number – 30 civilians – in the case of a murderer on a larger scale than Yahya Sinwar: Osama Bin-Laden.
An investigative report by The Wall Street Journal states that Israel rained down more bombs on Gaza in the first three months of the war than were dropped by the United States in Iraq over six years. Forty-eight prisoners died in Israeli detention facilities in the past year, compared to nine in Guantanamo in its entire 20 years of existence. The figures are also telling when it comes to the data concerning fatalities in other countries' wars: Coalition forces in Iraq killed 11,516 civilians in five years, and 46,319 civilians were killed in the 20 years of the war in Afghanistan. According to the most lenient estimates, some 30,000 civilians have been killed in the Strip since October 7, 2023.
In the more recent versions of "Bearing Witness," Mordechai has added an appendix that explains why, in his opinion, Israel's actions in Gaza constitute genocide, a subject he expounds on in our conversation. "We need to disconnect the way we think of genocide as Israelis – gas chambers, death camps and World War II – from the model that appears in the [1948] Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide," he explains. "There don't have to be death camps for it to be considered genocide. It's all boils down to the commission of acts and the intent, and the existence of both has to be established. In regard to committing acts, it's killing, but not only – [there is] also wounding people, abduction of children and even just attempts to prevent births among a particular group of people. What all these acts have in common is the deliberate destruction of a group.
"People I speak to generally don't argue about the actions taken; they argue about the intent. They will say that there is no document showing that Netanyahu or [IDF Chief of Staff] Herzl Halevi ordered genocide. But there are declarations and there are testimonies. Lots and lots of them. South Africa submitted a document of 120 pages that contained a great many testimonies proving intent. The journalist Yunes Tirawi collected declarations about genocide and ethnic cleansing from social media of more than 100 people with connections to the IDF – apparently many reserve officers.
"What are we doing with all this? From my point of view, the facts speak. I see a direct line between those declarations, an absence of trying to grapple with those declarations, and the reality on the ground that corresponds to the declarations."
The English-language version of "Bearing Witness" refers to articles by six leading Israeli authorities, who have already stated that in their view Israel is perpetrating genocide: Holocaust and genocide expert Omer Bartov; Holocaust researcher Daniel Blatman (who wrote that what Israel is doing in Gaza is somewhere between ethnic cleansing and genocide); historian Amos Goldberg; Holocaust scholar Raz Segal; international law expert Itamar Mann; and historian Adam Raz.
"The definition is less important," Mordechai says. "What's important is the actions. Let's say that the International Court of Justice in The Hague declares in another few years that it's not genocide but almost genocide – does that make it better? Does that attest to a moral victory by Israel? Do I want to live in a place that perpetrates 'almost genocide'? The debate over the term draws attention, but the things happen one way or the other, whether they reach the bar or not. In the end we must ask ourselves how we stop this and how we will answer our children when they ask us what we did during the war. We must act."
SEE ALSO:
TITLE: These Palestinians disappeared after encounters with Israeli troops in Gaza
https://apnews.com/article/israel-gaza-hamas-war-missing-military-court-f5a8633d750e496e1fe91dd07fa71a4f