Gaza’s Unyielding Humanitarian Crisis: Almost 10 Child Victims get amputated in Gaza every day
Shaimaa, an eight-year-old girl, was playing cards with her friends at home in Gaza City when a neighbour’s house was shelled. These injuries were so severe that she required a right hand and foot amputation after the blast. Shaimaa is a traumatised girl, but she’s still confident. ”My goal is to be a journalist to inform the world of the aggression against children in Gaza… Before the conflict, I was in charge of a radio station located in our school… My friends encouraged me,” she said, as seen in this picture and its caption by UNICEF/Abed Zaqout.
The suffering of the people in Gaza is further depicted by the fact that every day, at least ten children are limbing off one or both legs due to the ongoing fighting. Lazzarini Philippe, Executive Director of UNRWA, unveiled this fact during the press briefing held in Geneva.
“Ten children are losing one or two legs daily on average,” Lazzarini said. This figure, extracted from UNICEF, does not include the many children missing arms or hands.
Lazzarini said that it translates to nearly 2000 children having amputated limbs after over 260 days of this cruel war. He also noted that such amputations take place under really deplorable circumstances, and more often than not, surgeries are carried out without the administration of anaesthetic to the patient.
This turmoil and destruction have also left, for example, approximately twenty-one thousand kids missing, as per Save the Children. It is hoped that the conflict that has claimed more than fifteen thousand teenagers and infants’s lives in Gaza, according to Palestinian figures and other reports.
UNRWA, which coordinates nearly all the assistance delivered to the Gaza region, is having a bitter time with constant attacks and a critical funding problem. ”We have cash up to August,” the chief said Lazzarini, adding that the company lacked around 108m Euro to finance its activities in the rest of the year.
Originally founded to help over 700,000 Palestinians who fled or were expelled during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, it now has over 5 million registered and served refugee beneficiaries.
The situation in Gaza has worsened due to the military operations by Israeli forces that have killed 37,699 Palestinians, of which women and children are the majority, and over 86,200 other Palestinians injured.
However, more than 10,000 Palestinians are thought to have been killed under the debris of their bomb-drained homes. The Israeli military also arrested more than 9,500 Palestinians from the occupied West Bank and Gaza; meanwhile, 116 Israeli hostages held in Gaza with the resistance fighters since October 7.
The aggressors, in particular Tel Aviv, achieved the state in which much of Gaza was turned into a pile of ruins in nine months and created a critical shortage of water, food, electricity and medicine. The subsequent famine is already taking lives, especially in the northern Gaza Strip.
The UN on Tuesday drew attention to increased hazards that the human rights agency staff implementing humanitarian programs faced in Gaza as the authority demanded enhancements in cooperation with Israel. “The risks are becoming increasingly intolerable,” a UN representative said.
The International Court of Justice has thus accused Israel of genocide and has lately demanded that it stop assaulting Rafah. In this place, more than one million Palestinians had sought shelter before it was invaded on May 6.
The international community remains intact in intervening to save the lives of the affected population. The tender of the cease-fire and the subject of increasing the human rights aid in Gaza is more pressing than ever.
Incidents such as those involving Shaimaa and the recorded number of deaths show that it is millions of civilians like them suffering from the consequences of the conflict, and a political solution is needed to protect the non-combatants and end this humanitarian crisis.
