In Gaza, there is a bright and intelligent 10-year-old girl who speaks good English, has a beaming smile and seems to have a bright future ahead of her. The daughter of an X-ray technician, she had been accepted into an international exchange program and was due to return home soon.
Instead, she lies in a hospital bed with a badly infected thigh wound from the bomb explosion. Photos of her show a football-sized scar and part of her femur missing.
“She was supposed to be in Japan,” said Dr. Summer Attar, an orthopedic surgeon who cared for the girl and told me about her. “Right now she’s lying in bed deciding whether or not to remove her leg.” With Dr. Attar, a volunteer at a secret hospital in Aleppo, Syria, helping victims of Russian bombing. We have known each other for 10 years, ever since we worked together. A professor at Northwestern University School of Medicine, he has worked in conflict and crisis zones around the world, including Ukraine and Iraq, and most recently at a hospital in Gaza through the medical volunteer organization Rahma Worldwide and IDEALS.
Dr. Attar said hip amputation was necessary to save the girl’s life. Her father is struggling to accept how his and his daughter’s lives have fallen apart and has so far resisted.
Over the years, I’ve covered many bloody wars and written scathingly about how the governments of Russia, Sudan, and Syria recklessly bombed civilians. Not this time. My administration is on the side of engaging in what President Biden called “indiscriminate bombing.” This is not the same as intentionally targeting civilians, as other countries have done. But this time, as a taxpayer, I’m helping pay for the bomb.
Of course, Gaza is also different from Syria and Ukraine in that Israel did not start this war. Instead, Israel was brutally attacked by Hamas with a rampage of murder, torture, and rape. Any government would fight back, and Hamas used civilians as human shields to maximize their suffering.
However, military responses are not binary. It exists on a continuum. Traumatized by the attacks it had suffered, Israel chose to retaliate with 2,000 pound bombs, destroying entire neighborhoods and allowing only a small amount of aid to the territory, which was now on the brink of starvation. The bottom line is that this feels less like a war against Hamas and more like a war against Gazans.
In November, I wrote about Mohamed Al-Shanat, a PhD student in Gaza who was desperately trying to keep his children alive. I would like to inform you of some sad news. One of his sons was seriously injured.
“He is 13 years old and was injured while we were running for our lives,” Arshanat wrote in a WhatsApp message. “I had to carry him for two hours, bleeding and under intense shelling. I found a doctor who had taken shelter in the school and risked his life to save his son’s life. .”
“He later underwent a complex operation but is still unable to walk. He is very sick and suffers from malnutrition,” Arshanat wrote.
How will Arshanat’s American friends deal with him and his son after the war?
Many Americans are conflicted about the war. They may remain silent or look away rather than engage in heated and confrontational discussions, which can damage friendships. But the great Elie Wiesel described indifference as “the most insidious of all dangers” and said that “human suffering concerns men and women everywhere.”
We should be particularly concerned about the suffering of children, who make up half of Gazans. UNICEF estimates that at least 17,000 children in Gaza are unaccompanied or separated from their parents amid the chaos of war and displacement.
Dr. Attar is stalked by two dismembered teenage brothers. One boy had his leg amputated at the hip. He took his last breath on the operating table as the anesthesiologist cried. The other had lost much of the skin on his body and survived the night, but died in the morning.
Attar said hospitals were short of almost everything, and patients were languishing on the floor for weeks waiting for treatment. A woman’s screams lingered in his ears. She was asking for her help for her husband. In the chaos of the hospital, his wounds went untreated for a week, and his body was crawling with maggots.
Some will blame Hamas for all this. If Hamas had not attacked Israeli civilians, there would have been no Israeli bombing. That’s true, but to me it seems like an avoidance of moral responsibility. Israel and the US have the power, and the atrocities suffered by Israeli civilians do not justify the leveling of Palestinian neighborhoods.
President Biden should look into his soul. supplying the Gaza Strip with bombs that will devastate its neighbors, bombing civilians despite giving Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu diplomatic cover as Gazans face a looming crisis, bombing civilians, and following the rules. He blames Russia for undermining international order. hunger.
Biden cut funding to UNRWA, the United Nations relief and work agency responsible for delivering aid to Gazans, but did not outline a viable alternative plan for distributing aid. He is understandably furious that more than a dozen UNRWA employees (out of 13,000 employees) allegedly took part in the October 7 attack, and it is good that the UN immediately fired them. Thing.
Still, children in Gaza will die if UNRWA is unable to function due to defunding.
It would be unconscionable for Hamas terrorists to be harbored within UN agencies. And even if we tell ourselves we have moral priorities, it is unconscionable if our actions result in our children going hungry.
Decisions regarding the conduct of war are troubling because innocent civilians always suffer. This requires calculation of strategic benefits and human costs. How you evaluate trade-offs will vary from person to person, but resist the tendency to treat people of different races, faiths, or ethnicities as othering. When we are involved in conflict, we tend to dehumanize the other person. We can fight that impulse by asserting our common humanity and recognizing that all lives have equal value.
A life as precious as that of an American or Israeli child belongs to a bright 10-year-old girl in Gaza who is excitedly planning a trip to Japan. Instead, she bravely smiles through her excruciating pain and must endure amputation to save her life. And we Americans should face our complicity in her and all the Gaza tragedies.