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(...) In a letter to British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, shamefully ignored by virtually all ‘mainstream’ media outlets, 30 qualified, UK-based doctors, surgeons, nurses and medical professionals – volunteers in Gaza since 7 October 2023 – described the full extent of the catastrophe. (...)
The authors of the letter note that The Ministry of Health figure of approximately 40,000 Palestinians killed refers only to the number of identified bodies:
‘… but while working in Gaza we bore witness to untold numbers of unidentified bodies, many of them truly unidentifiable due to the extent of damage caused. A correspondence piece in The Lancet, one of Britain’s leading medical journals, estimated that the true figure could be 186,000, reflecting the scale of indirect and unrecorded deaths that have inevitably occurred due to the destruction of the healthcare system’.
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Some of at least 40,000 Palestinian victims of Israeli attacks.
The truly awesome scale of Israel’s crime becomes clear when we read the next paragraph, which is of course referring to the plight of fully 2.1 million people, the vast majority of them civilians:
‘With only marginal exceptions, everyone in Gaza is sick, injured, or both. This includes every national aid worker, every international volunteer, and every man, woman, and child. While working in Gaza we saw widespread malnutrition in our patients and our Palestinian healthcare colleagues. Many of us lost weight rapidly in Gaza despite having privileged access to food and having taken our own supplementary nutrient-dense food with us. We have photographic evidence of life-threatening malnutrition in our patients, from babies to the elderly, that we are willing or have already shared with you.
‘Virtually every child under the age of five whom we encountered, both inside and outside of the hospital, had both a cough and watery diarrhoea. Jaundice and hepatitis A infection were widespread in the hospitals in which we worked, while the surgical complication rate was near 100%. Surgical incisions were almost certain to become infected, due to the hospitals’ impossible operating conditions- including a lack of supplies, water, and medications including antibiotics- overcrowding, and due to patients’ malnutrition. We were forced to use household supplies including vinegar for antiseptic purposes, or went without.’
The letter continues:
‘We urge you to realise that epidemics are raging in Gaza. In addition to that, Israel has not stopped bombarding civilians in their tents or displacing the malnourished and sick population of Gaza, approximately half of whom are children, to areas with no running water or even toilets available. This is a horrifying reality. It is virtually guaranteed to result in widespread death from viral and bacterial diarrheal diseases and pneumonias, particularly in children under the age of five.
‘All of us treated children who seemed to have been deliberately targeted by military violence. Bullet wounds to children’s heads and torsos and amputations of limbs and eyes of children were commonplace.’ (...)
Beyond the barely conceivable human carnage, a detailed Bloomberg report noted that more than 70% of Gaza’s housing has been damaged, along with schools, hospitals and businesses:
‘So far, Israeli air strikes have left more than 42 million tonnes of debris across the Strip, according to the UN. That’s enough rubble to fill a line of dump trucks stretching from New York to Singapore.’
Complete article
Tags: #palestine #palestinians #israel #occupied_territories #gaza #war #war_crimes #civilian_casualties #infrastructure #health_care #human_rights
