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Zionists kill nine children of Gaza doctor couple

Zionists kill nine children of Gaza doctor couple

Kuwait Times26-05-2025

GAZA: Gaza's civil defense agency said Saturday that a Zionist strike in the southern city of Khan Yunis killed nine children from the same family. Agency spokesman Mahmud Bassal said civil defense crews retrieved 'the bodies of nine child martyrs, some of them charred, from the home of Dr Hamdi Al-Najjar and his wife, Dr Alaa Al-Najjar, all of whom were their children'.
He added that Hamdi Al-Najjar and another son, Adam, were also seriously wounded in the strike on Friday. A medical source at Nasser Hospital, where Alaa Al-Najjar works, gave Adam's age as 10 years old. Footage of the aftermath released by the civil defense agency showed rescuers recovering badly burned remains from the damaged home.
The children's funeral took place at Nasser Hospital, AFP footage showed. Muneer Alboursh, director general of the health ministry in Gaza, said on X that the strike happened shortly after Hamdi Al-Najjar drove his wife to work. 'Just minutes after returning home, a missile struck their house,' he said, adding the father was 'in intensive care'. 'This is the reality our medical staff in Gaza endure. Words fall short in describing the pain,' he said. 'In Gaza, it is not only healthcare workers who are targeted – (the Zionist entity's) aggression goes further, wiping out entire families.'
Zionist strikes killed at least 79 people on Saturday across the Palestinian territory, a toll that doesn't include hospitals in the battered north that are now inaccessible. Bassal told AFP the dead included a couple who were killed with their two young children in a predawn strike on a house in the Amal quarter of the southern city of Khan Yunis.
To the west of the city, at least five people were killed by a drone strike on a crowd of people that had gathered to wait for aid trucks, he said. At Nasser Hospital, tearful mourners gathered around white-shrouded bodies outside. 'Suddenly, a missile from an F-16 destroyed the entire house, and all of them were civilians — my sister, her husband and their children,' said Wissam Al-Madhoun. 'We found them lying in the street. What did this child do to (Zionist Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu?'
The Zionist entity resumed operations in Gaza on March 18, ending a two-month ceasefire. Gaza's health ministry said Saturday that at least 3,747 people had been killed in the territory since then, taking the war's overall toll to 53,901, mostly civilians. United Nations chief Antonio Guterres said on Friday that Palestinians were enduring 'the cruelest phase' of the war in Gaza, where a lengthy Zionist blockade has led to widespread shortages of food and medicine.
The Gaza City municipality, meanwhile, warned Saturday of 'a potential large-scale water crisis' due to a lack of supplies needed for urgent repairs. It said damage from the war had 'affected the majority of Gaza's water infrastructure, leaving large portions of the population vulnerable to severe water shortages'. It added that temperatures were rising and demand was expected to increase. – Agencie

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Conditions in Gaza ‘catastrophic'
Conditions in Gaza ‘catastrophic'

Kuwait Times

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  • Kuwait Times

Conditions in Gaza ‘catastrophic'

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Several hundred more truckloads of aid currently await UN collection from the Palestinian side of Kerem Shalom. 'More aid would actually get to the people if you would collect the aid waiting for you by the crossings,' COGAT, the military aid coordination agency, said to the UN in a posting on X on Friday. However, the UN said that on Tuesday the military denied all its requests to access Kerem Shalom to pick up the aid. And on Thursday, when 65 trucks of aid managed to leave the crossing, all but five turned back due to intense fighting. Five trucks of medical aid managed to reach the warehouses of a field hospital, but 'a group of armed individuals stormed the warehouses... looting large quantities of medical equipment, supplies, medicines and nutritional supplements that was intended for malnourished children,' Dujarric said. Ceasefire proposal Zionist entity says it has been facilitating all aid deliveries. 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Large crowds gathered in several cities after Friday prayers waving Palestinian flags and burning pictures of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. 'We are out in support with Gaza. And to show the world that Gaza is not alone, we are standing with them. Wherever Muslims are oppressed, we strongly defend them and condemn it,' said 28-year-old Jannat, who goes by one name, in the capital Kabul. Taleban Prime Minister Hassan Akhund condemned Zionist actions in Gaza, labeling them a 'genocide' and expressing growing concern over the escalating violence against Palestinian civilians. — AFP

Scientists in Mexico develop tortilla for people with no fridge
Scientists in Mexico develop tortilla for people with no fridge

Kuwait Times

timea day ago

  • Kuwait Times

Scientists in Mexico develop tortilla for people with no fridge

Peering through a microscope, food scientist Raquel Gomez studies microorganisms that add nutrients and preserve tortillas for several weeks without refrigerators -- a luxury in impoverished Mexican communities. The humble tortilla is a Mexican staple, consumed in tacos and other dishes by millions every day, from the Latin American nation's arid northern deserts to its tropical southern jungle. Most Mexicans buy fresh corn tortillas from small neighborhood shops. The wheat flour version developed by Gomez and her team contains probiotics -- live microorganisms found in yogurt and other fermented foods. As well as the nutritional benefits, the fermented ingredients mean the tortilla can be kept for up to a month without refrigeration, much longer than a homemade one, according to its creators. It was developed 'with the most vulnerable people in mind,' Gomez, a professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), told AFP in her laboratory. Nearly 14 percent of children under five suffer from chronic malnutrition in Mexico, according to official figures. In Indigenous communities, the figure is around 27 percent. Microorganisms of a probiotic are seen under a microscope. Dr. Raquel Gomez Pliego analyzes the microorganisms of a probiotic under a microscope. Dr. Raquel Gomez Pliego prepares "super tortillas". Dr. Raquel Gomez Pliego removes a tortilla from a press. A tortilla is heated on a stove in Mexico City. Fridges unaffordable The tortilla developed by Gomez is not yet commercially available, but it could benefit people like Teresa Sanchez. The 46-year-old housewife smokes meat using a wood-burning stove in her house with wooden walls and a metal roof. Like most of her neighbors in the town of Oxchuc, in the southern state of Chiapas, Sanchez has no refrigerator, so she uses the methods handed down by her Indigenous Tzeltal ancestors. 'My mother taught me and grandparents always do it this way,' she told AFP. 'Where are you going to get a refrigerator if there's no money?' Less than two-thirds of people in Chiapas, a poverty-plagued region with a large Indigenous population, have a refrigerator -- the lowest among Mexico's 32 states. The average maximum temperature in Chiapas rose from 30.1 to 32 degrees Celsius between 2014 and 2024, according to official estimates. Half of its territory is considered vulnerable to climate change. While Oxchuc is located in a mountainous, temperate area, the lack of refrigerators forces its inhabitants to rely on traditional food preservation methods. 'We think about what we're going to eat and how many of us there are. We boil it, and if there's some left over, we boil it again,' Sanchez said. Sometimes meat is salted and left to dry under the sun. Tortillas are stored in containers made from tree bark. For that reason, Sanchez only shops for the bare necessities, although her budget is limited anyway. 'I don't have that much money to buy things,' she said. A worker handles a tortilla at a street food stall in the Roma neighborhood. A woman eats a taco at a street food stall in the Roma neighborhood. Smoked beef is prepared for preservation due to a lack of refrigerators in the municipality of Oxchuc, Chiapas State, Mexico. Dr. Raquel Gomez Pliego prepares "super tortillas". No preservatives Gomez and her team use prebiotics -- which are mainly found in high-fiber foods -- to feed probiotic cultures and produce compounds beneficial to health, she said. Thanks to the fermented ingredients, no artificial preservatives are needed in the laboratory developed tortilla, Gomez said. That is another benefit because such additives have potentially toxic effects, said Guillermo Arteaga, a researcher at the University of Sonora. One of the most commonly used additives in processed wheat flour tortillas is calcium propionate, which is considered harmful to the colon's microbiota, Arteaga said. Although her tortilla is made from wheat flour -- a type eaten mainly in northern Mexico -- Gomez does not rule out using the same method for corn tortillas, which are preferred by many Mexicans but can go bad quickly in high temperatures. The researchers patented their tortilla in 2023. UNAM signed a contract with a company to market the food, but the agreement fell through. Gomez, who won an award in December from the Mexican Institute of Industrial Property, still hopes to find partners to distribute her tortillas. She is confident that even though they were developed in a laboratory, consumers will still want to eat them. - AFP

Experts point out how TV's Dr House often got it wrong
Experts point out how TV's Dr House often got it wrong

Kuwait Times

time3 days ago

  • Kuwait Times

Experts point out how TV's Dr House often got it wrong

He's the maverick medic who loved to confound the medical establishment with his brilliant, unorthodox diagnoses. But Dr Gregory House, the misanthropic genius who was the star of the long-running 'House' television series, got an awful lot wrong himself, Croatian doctors claim. From a neurologist at work on the wrong end of a patient by performing a colonoscopy, or an MRI scan done by a physician who is clearly not a radiologist, Croatian researchers have pulled the American series up on its medical accuracy in a paper published this month. Denis Cerimagic, a professor at Dubrovnik University, and two fellow neurologists -- all big fans of the series -- listed 77 errors after analyzing all 177 episodes of the show, which ran from 2004 to 2012. 'We focused on the diagnoses of main cases, reality of clinical practice presentation and detection of medical errors,' Cerimagic told AFP. He and his peers -- Goran Ivkic and Ervina Bilic -- broke the mistakes down into five categories including misuses of medical terminology, misinformation and simple weirdness -- something which the show's anti-hero, played by British star Hugh Laurie, possessed in abundance. That limp They included the use of mercury thermometers -- which had long given way to digital ones -- the term heart attack and cardiac arrest being used interchangeably when they are not the same, and that vitamin B12 deficiency can be corrected with just one injection. Nor is there a universal chemotherapy for all types of malignant tumors, as one episode suggested. But arguably the biggest error of all is that Laurie -- whose character's genius for deduction comes from the misdiagnosis that left him with a limp and chronic pain -- uses his cane on the wrong side. The stick should be carried on his unaffected side, Cerimagic said, though he understood why the actor had done it because 'it's more effective to see the pronounced limp on the screen'. Their research also found medical procedures being done by specialists who had no business being there, like an infectologist performing an autopsy. At times the series also stretched reality beyond breaking point, with the findings of complex laboratory tests done in just a few hours. And doctors rarely turn detective and take it upon themselves to enter patients' homes to look for environmental causes of illnesses. Not to mention Dr House's unethical behavior -- 'Brain tumor, she's gonna die' the paper quoted him as saying -- and the character's opiates addiction. The researchers say they may have missed other mistakes. 'We are neurologists while other medical specialists would certainly establish additional errors,' Cerimagic added. Medical errors Whatever their criticisms, the researchers say that modern medical series are far better produced than in the past, thanks to medical advisors. It is not like some 20 years ago when you had doctors looking at X-rays upside down, the neurologist said. 'Now only medical professionals can notice errors,' Cerimagic said. Despite its flaws, they thought the series could even be used to help train medical students. 'The focus could be on recognizing medical errors in the context of individual episodes, adopting the teamwork concept and a multidisciplinary approach in diagnosis and treatment,' Cerimagic said. He said he and his colleagues were taken aback by the response to their paper 'House M.D.: Between reality and fiction' -- which is not the first academic study to cast doubt on the good doctor and his methods. 'The idea was to make a scientific paper interesting not only to doctors but also to people without specific medical knowledge.' - AFP

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