The horror of Gaza's children's hospitals

New Statesman​

2 days ago

Photo by Belal Khaled/Anadolu via Getty Images
On 16 June, I gave testimony to the Foreign Affairs Committee in Westminster. I wish I could have shared stories of hope, or progress, or of basic human decency. But I was there to testify about the atrocities Israel is committing in Gaza, and to ask how long the UK government will remain complicit.
The last major functioning hospital in southern Gaza, Nasser Hospital, is at risk of being forced out of service by the Israeli military. Tanks have moved within striking distance. Forced displacement orders have been issued. There are hundreds of patients inside, including dozens in intensive care. Among the exhausted doctors who stay to care for patients are colleagues I worked alongside a few months ago, when I was volunteering there.
If the hospital is bombed, invaded or forced to shut down – as has happened to nearly every other hospital in Gaza – the healthcare system in the south will collapse entirely. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians will be left with no healthcare. And patients will die – this is not hyperbole. This is part of a pattern of violations by the Israeli military that UN experts and human rights groups have concluded amounts to a genocide unfolding before our eyes.
On 23 March, I was treating patients at Nasser Hospital, including dozens of children injured by military air strikes following Israel's decision to break the ceasefire on 18 March. Then, without warning, a huge blast shook the building. We ran outside to see what had happened and a colleague screamed: 'They hit surgery.' Flames engulfed the building. The biggest operating hospital in Gaza, full of staff and patients, had been targeted by an Israeli strike. A war crime in plain sight.
On the day Israel broke the ceasefire we were awoken in the middle of the night at the hospital, where volunteer medical staff both worked and slept, by the biggest air strikes I'd ever experienced. The doors were banging, and the walls were shaking. Everybody was in a state of panic. As the ambulances and donkey carts of casualties started to flood in, our emergency room and paediatric intensive care unit were overwhelmed. Many of the patients were children, bombs dropped on them while they slept in their tents. In the first couple of hours, at least 76 casualties were taken straight to the morgue, dead on arrival. We later learned that at least 183 children were killed in Israeli military attacks in just that one day.
We ran around between patients who were rapidly losing blood, gasping for life. We had to make agonising decisions about which children to prioritise. Some of the children I saw had injuries they could never survive. Others could have been saved with the necessary resources, but we had shortages of everything.
I remember their faces, their earrings, their two little first teeth. I remember how carefully they had been dressed for sleep in their cold tents, the delicateness with which their hair was braided. I remember a baby, not yet one, brought in by her uncle. She had multiple perforations to her bowel, bleeding around her kidney, and swelling of her brain after Israeli bombs hit her home. Her mother was killed and her father injured in the same attack. A few days after her life-saving surgery, her first and only repeated word was 'mama'.
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Another little girl, about five years old, had the word 'unknown' written on her abdomen – no family had come in with her. She had severe bleeding in her spleen, multiple perforations to her bowel, and shrapnel going through her brain, resulting in paralysis on one side of her body. There was a boy, about six years old. An artery in his leg was severed, he was haemorrhaging when we treated him. His foot was crushed, and we thought he might have a brain injury. His siblings were all killed bar one sister.
This is just a snapshot of the patients I saw on the day of one of the largest child death tolls in Gaza's history. As the hospital now faces an invasion, staff continue to treat an influx of injuries, many of them from attacks at US-supported Israeli militarised 'aid' distribution points. Doctors report that most of the patients have been injured by direct sniper fire to the head or chest, and almost all of them are acutely malnourished. Meanwhile, infants in the neonatal department risk starving to death as the hospital runs out of essential baby formula that continues to be barred from entering by Israel.
Since October 2023, at least 56,000 Palestinians have been killed, including more than 17,100 children. Some 132,000 people have been injured, and some 92 per cent of homes damaged or destroyed. And these figures are all likely underestimates according to experts' analyses; thousands are missing. Nothing I write here could fully encapsulate the devastating catalogue of atrocities that has occurred in Gaza in the past 20 months. These numbers and stories should make anyone feel disgusted and moved to act. Yet the lack of action is nothing short of abhorrent.
The killing or injuring of more than 50,000 children is not an 'inevitable outcome of war'. These are children born into an illegal siege, primarily to families who are already refugees from violent displacement. And those numbers are just the children who have been reported. Thousands more are trapped under rubble, left with life-changing injuries, or living with chronic conditions without access to proper medical care.
Gaza's health system has been systematically destroyed by the Israeli military. The Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital, Gaza's only cancer facility, was destroyed. Al Amal and the European Gaza Hospital have been forced out of service. There are now no functioning hospitals in Rafah or north Gaza. According to a UN commission, this amounts to the crime of 'extermination'. The testimonies of doctors leaving Gaza, along with evidence from human rights organisations and UN bodies, demand urgent action. The supply of British arms to Israel makes the UK complicit in these atrocities. It is no longer enough to express concern while enabling violence. The UK must immediately suspend arms sales to Israel and uphold its legal and moral obligations under international law.
Silence and inaction are not neutral; they are choices that perpetuate suffering. It is time to choose accountability over complicity, and justice over political convenience. We refuse to let these atrocities go unnoticed. We refuse to accept a world in which Palestinians are forced to endure this nightmare in silence.
Dr Tanya Haj-Hassan is a paediatric intensive care physician who was in Gaza from 15 February to 26 March as part of a medical team with Medical Aid for Palestinians
[See also: Israel's hollow victory]
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