Quoting the head of UNICEF that all 600,000 children in Rafah in southern Gaza are sick, injured, or malnourished, Professor Juan Cole of the University of Michigan provides the horrifying details in his blog today Informed Comment:
600,000 is only a little less than the population of Boston within city limits. Imagine Boston as populated only by children. Then imagine them all, every one, as injured by shrapnel, or suffering gastrointestinal and liver diseases, or as wasting away with hunger from lack of food.
Cole continues by saying the daily Israeli airstrikes on Rafah have often killed or wounded children, and since Israel has destroyed all the hospitals, “children have to have operations or limbs amputated without anesthesia or antibiotics.” He quotes a UN report from the Gaza Ministry of Health:
since October 7, “34,622 Palestinians were killed in Gaza and 77,867 Palestinians were injured.” Some 70% of the killed have been women and children.
Between the afternoons of 1 and 3 May, according to the Ministry of Health (MoH) in Gaza, 54 Palestinians were killed and 102 injured, including 26 killed and 51 injured in the last 24 hours.
Cole says “these injuries, maladies and food deficits have been imposed on these children by Israeli military policy…. Israeli rules of engagement, the most inhumane in the world, permit 15 to 20 civilian deaths per militant killed.” Moreover, he reports the Israeli military has impeded or denied many attempted aid deliveries:
The UN says that between 27 April and 2 May the Israeli military impeded or denied 60% of attempted aid deliveries in the north of Gaza. In southern Gaza, of aid and food deliveries requiring coordination, a third were impeded or denied by the Israeli authorities.
Cole reports how a communications officer with the UN’s World Health Organization describes what it has meant for over a million people to be forced suddenly to Rafah (which had a population of about 300,000 before the Israeli assault).
He described people sleeping rough or in makeshift tents amidst mountains of garbage and open air toilets. Jaundice, an inflammation of the liver, is spreading in the population, including among children. Flies land on feces and then on food, which can’t be washed except in dirty water.
(A short video embedded in Cole’s article shows “waste piling up, bringing misery.”) www.juancole.com/...
Cole reports how the Israeli military “has cruelly denied key medical equipment to the children and women they have wounded with their bombs.” He quotes the head of emergency programs at Doctors Without Borders:
“Delivering lifesaving supplies into Gaza is nearly impossible amidst Israeli authorities’ blockades, delays, and restrictions on humanitarian aid and essential medical supplies….They have repeatedly refused our requests to bring in biomedical equipment such as oxygen concentrators.
The doctor explains:
An oxygen concentrator is a medical device that filters out the nitrogen in air, delivering purified oxygen to patients. For malnourished children with severe anaemia, injured people with severe blood loss and newborns with breathing difficulties, this device can be the difference between life and death.
But despite being essential to our patients’ survival, we have no idea if or when an oxygen concentrator will reach a hospital in Gaza.
Cole says “the petty and cruel denial of medical equipment to the civilian Gaza population has been a mark of the current extremist Israeli government.”
Cole also says the Israeli authorities have told “bald-faced lies” about allowing unlimited entry of humanitarian goods, and he points out:
“all this interference in deliveries of food and medicine by Israel comes at a time when US AID says that famine is already inevitable.”
www.juancole.com/…