gaza has the most child amputees in history

“this is the biggest cohort of pediatric amputees in history.”

We know that thousands of children have been killed in Gaza, but what about the ones who survive?

Last week, a harrowing report in The New Yorker by Eliza Griswold detailed the disturbing number of children who have been disabled by a military force that’s become increasingly isolated, even amongst its own allies. “This is the biggest cohort of pediatric amputees in history,” Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a London-based plastic-and-reconstructive surgeon who specializes in pediatric trauma, told The New Yorker. He’s performing as many as six amputations per day in Gaza. According to UNICEF, one thousand children have been amputated losing one or their both legs, since the shelling began, many of them without sedation, pain medication or anesthesia. Save the Children reports that ten children are amputated every 24 hours in Gaza. “To mark the gravity of these procedures, and to mourn, Abu-Sittah and other medical staff placed the severed limbs of children in small cardboard boxes,” Griswold writes. “They labelled the boxes with masking tape, on which they wrote a name and body part, and buried them.”

“This is the biggest cohort of pediatric amputees in history,” Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a London-based plastic-and-reconstructive surgeon who specializes in pediatric trauma, told Griswold. He’s performing as many as six amputations per day in Gaza.

Griswold tells the story of Gazal, a four-year-old girl who was injured by a missile. A doctor was forced to treat her wound with a kitchen knife without sterilization or anesthesia. She was later amputated at the hip. One month later, a projectile hit the children’s ward she was living in, and she watched her twelve-year-old roommate get decapitated. When she gets out of bed, she sometimes mistakingly use her missing limb and falls. Another child was only 14-years-old when he lost his leg after being trapped under the rumble. He was found holding his dead mother’s hand.