TITLE: I’m an American doctor who went to Gaza. What I saw wasn’t war — it was annihilation
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2024-02-16/rafah-gaza-hospitals-surgery-israel-bombing-ground-offensive-children
EXCERPT: As we approached the European Gaza Hospital … there were rows of tents that lined and blocked the streets. Many Palestinians gravitated toward this and other hospitals hoping it would represent a sanctuary from the violence — they were wrong.
People also spilled into the hospital: living in hallways, stairwell corridors and even storage closets. The once-wide walkways designed by the European Union to accommodate the busy traffic of medical staff, stretchers and equipment were now reduced to a single-file passageway. On either side, blankets hung from the ceiling to cordon off small areas for entire families, offering a sliver of privacy. A hospital designed to accommodate about 300 patients was now struggling to care for more than 1,000 patients and hundreds more seeking refuge.
There were a limited number of local surgeons available. We were told that many had been killed or arrested, their whereabouts or even their existence unknown. Others were trapped in occupied areas in the north or nearby places where it was too risky to travel to the hospital. There was only one local plastic surgeon left and he covered the hospital 24/7. His home had been destroyed, so he lived in the hospital, and was able to stuff all of his personal possessions into two small hand bags. This narrative became all too common among the remaining staff at the hospital. This surgeon was lucky, because his wife and daughter were still alive, although almost everyone else working in the hospital was mourning the loss of their loved ones.
I began work immediately, performing 10 to 12 surgeries a day, working 14 to 16 hours at a time. The operating room would often shake from the incessant bombings, sometimes as frequent as every 30 seconds. We operated in unsterile settings that would’ve been unthinkable in the United States. We had limited access to critical medical equipment: We performed amputations of arms and legs daily, using a Gigli saw, a Civil War-era tool, essentially a segment of barbed wire. Many amputations could’ve been avoided if we’d had access to standard medical equipment. It was a struggle trying to care for all the injured within the constructs of a healthcare system that has utterly collapsed.
I listened to my patients as they whispered their stories to me, as I wheeled them into the operating room for surgery. The majority had been sleeping in their homes, when they were bombed. I couldn’t help thinking that the lucky ones died instantaneously, either by the force of the explosion or being buried in the rubble. The survivors faced hours of surgery and multiple trips to the operating room, all while mourning the loss of their children and spouses. Their bodies were filled with shrapnel that had to be surgically pulled out of their flesh, one piece at a time.
I stopped keeping track of how many new orphans I had operated on. After surgery they would be filed somewhere in the hospital, I’m unsure of who will take care of them or how they will survive. On one occasion, a handful of children, all about ages 5 to 8, were carried to the emergency room by their parents. All had single sniper shots to the head. These families were returning to their homes in Khan Yunis, about 2.5 miles away from the hospital, after Israeli tanks had withdrawn. But the snipers apparently stayed behind. None of these children survived.
On my last day, as I returned to the guest house where locals knew foreigners were staying, a young boy ran up and handed me a small gift. It was a rock from the beach, with an Arabic inscription written with a marker: “From Gaza, With Love, Despite the Pain.” As I stood on the balcony looking out at Rafah for the last time, we could hear the drones, bombings and bursts of machine-gun fire, but something was different this time: The sounds were louder, the explosions were closer.
This week, Israeli forces raided another large hospital in Gaza, and they’re planning a ground offensive in Rafah. I feel incredibly guilty that I was able to leave while millions are forced to endure the nightmare in Gaza. As an American, I think of our tax dollars paying for the weapons that likely injured my patients there. Already driven from their homes, these people have nowhere else to turn.
TITLE: Give northern Gaza aid, or ceasefire talks are off the table: Hamas calls off negotiations as the UN claims Israel is waging a 'concerted campaign' after strikes on food distribution centres
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13095075/gaza-aid-ceasefire-israel-unrwa-rafah-campaign.html
EXCERPT: Hamas will suspend all negotiations with Israel until aid and relief reaches the beleaguered communities in the northern Gaza Strip, a senior source was reported to have said today.
Citing 'a leading source from Hamas', the Palestinian Quds News Network reported: 'The [Hamas] movement intends to suspend negotiations until aid and relief are delivered to the northern Gaza Strip. Negotiations cannot proceed while hunger afflicts our people.'
Tentative hopes of a ceasefire were dashed at the end of January when Israeli Prime Minister rejected two key demands made by Hamas, underlining that Israel would not withdraw from Gaza or release political prisoners held in Israel.
Earlier today, Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh reiterated the group's demand of a complete ceasefire in Gaza, a day after US President Joe Biden called for a 'temporary truce' to secure the release of around 130 remaining hostages.
'The resistance will not agree to anything less than ceasefire, withdrawing of the occupying army from the Strip, lifting the oppressive blockade, and providing safe shelter for the displaced people,' he said.
Some 90 per cent of Gaza's 2.3mn population have been displaced since Hamas' October 7 incursion, with Israel raining down a devastating bombardment on the Strip's major cities.
At least 28,858 people have been killed in Gaza, most of them women and children, since October, according to the Hamas-run Palestinian Health Ministry. Humanitarian aid groups warn the situation is dire for people holding out in the north and the estimated 1.4mn crammed into the southern city of Rafah.
Today, the head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees said Israel is waging a 'concerted campaign' to destroy it, having allegedly destroyed more than 150 UNRWA installations since the conflict began.
TITLE: US envoy says Israel has not presented evidence that Hamas diverted U.N. aid deliveries in Gaza
https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-war-news-02-17-2024-410725a8850f658950726772911f93e1
EXCERPT: Israel has not presented specific evidence for its claim that Hamas is diverting U.N. aid, and its recent targeted killings of Gaza police commanders safeguarding truck convoys have made it “virtually impossible” to distribute the goods safely, a top U.S. envoy said in rare public criticism of Israel.
New airstrikes in central Gaza on Saturday killed more than 40 people, including children, and wounded at least 50, according to Associated Press journalists and hospital officials.
David Satterfield, the Biden administration’s special Middle East envoy for humanitarian issues, said that with the departure of police escorts following Israeli strikes, criminal gangs are increasingly targeting the truck convoys carrying badly needed aid. He said the lawlessness as well as regular Israeli protests at entry points by those opposed to aid going into Gaza have disrupted delivery.
“We are working with the Israeli government, the Israeli military in seeing what solutions can be found here because everyone wants to see the assistance continue,” Satterfield told the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on Friday. A solution “is going to require some form of security escorts to return.”
Satterfield said that Israeli officials have not presented “specific evidence of diversion or theft” of U.N. assistance, but that the militants have their own interests in using “other channels of assistance ... to shape where and to whom assistance goes.”
Even before the latest setback, the U.S. has said aid reaching Gaza is woefully inadequate. More than half of Gaza’s 2.3 million people are packed into the southern city of Rafah, on the border with Egypt, having heeded Israeli evacuation orders. Yet nowhere is safe, with Israel also carrying out airstrikes in Rafah.
TITLE: Former Mossad official: ‘Children in Gaza over 4 deserve to be starved’
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20240217-former-mossad-official-children-in-gaza-over-4-deserve-to-be-starved/
EXCERPT: “In Gaza, everyone is involved. Everyone voted for Hamas. Anyone over the age of four is a Hamas supporter. And our goal at the moment, and this is in continuation of what you said, is to turn them from Hamas supporters to Hamas dislikers,” stated former head of Mossad’s Captive and Missing Division.
Rami Igra claimed, during an interview broadcast on Israeli state television, that all civilians in Gaza are guilty and deserve to face Israel’s policy of collective punishment, which prevents food, medicine and humanitarian aid.
This is not the first time that Israeli officials have incited against civilians in Gaza. In November, the Israeli occupation Minister of Heritage Amihai Eliyahu said that dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza is a possible solution to destroy it and an option that must be studied.
Eliyahu, a member of the extremist Otzma Yehudit party headed by Itamar Ben-Gvir, explained in statements to the Israel Hayom newspaper: “Death does not frighten the residents of Gaza, and we must know what scares and terrifies them, in order to force them to leave, and wipe them off the face of the Earth. They should tremble in fear and terror.”
He added: “I do not agree with describing the residents of Gaza as civilians. There are no civilians in Gaza and there is no difference between them and Hamas.”
In mid-October, Israeli President Isaac Herzog incited the killing of civilians in the Gaza Strip, asserting that everyone in Gaza was involved in the war.