2 000 Gaza kids lose legs
TRAGEDY: SHORTAGE OF DRUGS FORCES MEDICS TO AMPUTATE LIMBS Treatment might have been different with more resources.
There is little Gaza’s doctors can do to alleviate the pain that threeyear-old Suhaib Khuzaiq still feels from a shrapnel injury that caused his leg to be amputated above the knee in December.
“He is in pain and in need of painkillers and a prosthetic limb that is only available outside Gaza,” his father Ali Khuzaiq, 31, said from Gaza City’s Al-Ahli hospital, where Suhaib is treated.
On 6 December, an Israeli air strike on their neighbourhood of Tal Al-Hawa, southwest of Gaza City, injured Suhaib and destroyed their home, Khuzaiq said.
The war and Israel’s blockade have caused a shortage of medicines and destroyed much of Gaza’s medical capacity.
As a result, amputations have become a way of handling injuries that in other circumstances might have been treated differently, causing their number to soar further.
Citing data from UN Children’s Fund (Unicef), the chief for Palestinian refugees said this week that in Gaza “every day 10 children... are losing one leg or two on average”, adding that it meant “around 2 000 children” had lost legs since the start of the war.
Unicef spokesperson Jonathan Crickx later said that difficulties in gathering data in a war zone meant the figures were only “estimates” that would take time to verify, but that the agency “has
met many children who have lost limbs”.
Mahmoud Basal, a spokesperson for Gaza’s Civil Defence agency, said the estimate seemed realistic, because “as the civil defence crews work in the field, with every strike they recover children, many of whom lose either legs or arms, sometimes requiring amputations at high points on the limb”.
Medical sources said that amputations are often the only available option. “There are moments when anaesthesia is not available, but to save the lives of citizens, we resort to amputation and this
causes severe pain for the wounded,” Dr Maher, a surgeon at AlAhli hospital, said.
“Every day, there are attacks that result in amputations of legs or arms for children, adults, and women.”
In May, non-profit Save The Children said that “thousands of child amputees and injured children are struggling to recover without adequate pain relief and devices like wheelchairs”.
Proper prostheses are in short supply in the Gaza Strip, which is subject to a tight blockade that does not automatically allow medical equipment and medi
cines to enter the territory.
Marwa Abu Zaida, 40, and her eight-year-old son Nasser Abu Drabi hope to travel abroad to get treatment and prostheses.
Her leg and his arm were amputated after they were injured in an Israeli strike in the northern Gaza town of Beit Lahia.
Medical evacuations are needed but are rare in Gaza, including for other patients such as those in need of cancer treatment, said Bashar Murad of the Palestinian Red Crescent in Gaza.
“The health sector has collapsed entirely in Gaza,” Murad added. –