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Gaza
tragedies
29
March 2007
As one of seven doctors
from Britain
paying an eight day visit to Gaza, I was shown the room in Al Wafa rehabilitation hospital where two nurses
were killed in April 2002 by a sniper firing from a nearby building. They
went into the room to tend a paraplegic patient who had to be turned every
two hours. A bullet passed through the heart of the first nurse, killing
him instantly, and then entered the chest of his colleague who died
shortly afterwards. The patient managed to get to one of the nurses and
was doing external cardiac massage when the staff arrived. Although the
sniper had fired deliberately, the BBC reported that the two nurses had
been killed in ‘cross fire.’ The name of the hospital is painted
clearly on its walls.
In the next room we were introduced to a man in his 20s, shot in
his home in Khan Younis near the border with Israel. According to the senior doctor, the man was the victim of an expanding
bullet, manufactured in California, fired by an Israeli sniper two months ago, well after the Israeli
withdrawal from Gaza. It severed his spinal cord, paralysing both legs. At the young man’s
bedside was his father, recovering from a fracture through his left femur,
caused by another of the sniper’s bullets. A third bullet left the
mother blind in one eye. The killing or wounding of health professionals
on duty or civilians are violations of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
Father
and son who were shot in their home by a sniper
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Three of us
visited the house where 17 members of one family were killed during an
Israeli incursion carried out in revenge for ineffectual Qassam rocket
attacks on Sderot. On
6 Nov 2006, we were told, 13 to 15 tanks came into the area of Beit Hanoun where the
house stands. A curfew was imposed which confined people indoors. At 5.30
on 8 Nov, when the family was asleep, three tanks round the house shelled
it. We met a boy of about 16 who had lost his forearm, and spoke to a boy
of about 12 who had lost his foot in the bombardment which killed his
mother and two sisters. A woman lost both legs.
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Outside Gaza
City, at a sewerage plant we were told that it had been renovated in 1997, but
the American expert who specified the changes gave bad advice and the
alterations were inadequate. It cannot cope and it cannot be expanded.
Much raw sewerage has to be discharged via the Wadi Gaza into the sea. One
of its two water treatment towers was shelled from a nearby Israeli army
depot.
Palestinian
rescue workers search for bodies amongst shanty houses after a
cesspool embankment collapsed
March 27, 2007
(Associated
Press photo)
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