Thousands Of Small Children Are Being Killed In Gaza
By John J. Duncan Jr.
duncanj@knoxfocus.com
“A badly burned toddler screamed for a mother he didn’t know was dead, screaming because doctors didn’t have enough painkillers.”
“An eight-year-old whose brain is exposed because bombing damaged part of his skull.”
“A teenage girl, her eyes surgically removed, because every bone in her face is smashed.”
“A three-year-old double amputee whose severed limbs are laid out in a pink box beside him.”
All these horrible things that happened to children in Gaza were described in a mid-December speech to the Irish Parliament by member Holly Cavins.
The same day I saw Ms. Cavins’ speech on YouTube, I read a CNN story about eight-year-old Jinan Mughari and 20-month-old Amir Taha.
Jinan was in a full-body cast because of a crushed leg and broken skull. She said, “They bombed the house in front of us and then our home.”
As to the toddler, Amir, the CNN story said he “lies silently on the bed – his fluffy hair sticking up, his baby-soft skin violated by a raw, jagged wound across his forehead. Purple bruises swell around one of his big brown eyes.”
He’s an orphan now, his aunt says, with his parents and two of his siblings killed in an Israeli air strike. But he does not know that yet, his aunt, Nehaia Al-Qadra said. He is too young to understand.
“They found Amir in his mom’s arms laying in the street,” Al-Qadra said. “His sister died, his brother died, his uncle and his other sister injured in the hospital. Here we are, he doesn’t have a mother or a father or an older sister or brother. Now it’s just us two and God.”
“Amir wants his father. Yesterday he saw a nurse that looked like his dad, and he kept screaming ‘Dad! Dad! Dad!’,” Al-Qadra said. When she needs to calm him down she shows the toddler a video of his father.
A Reuters News Service story on Dec. 14 said: “Israel pounded the length of Gaza Strip on Thursday, killing families in their homes, even as Washington dispatched an envoy to encourage its ally to be more precise in its war against Hamas militants.
“Two weeks after a truce collapsed, the war is now raging across the entire Palestinian enclave and a humanitarian catastrophe is unfolding.
“In Rafah, jammed with people in makeshift tents on Gaza’s southern edge, people wept at a morgue where bodies of those killed in the latest overnight air strikes were wrapped in bloodied shrouds. Some were small children.”
The story told of two adjacent homes bombed where 26 people were killed. The day before I wrote this column, an emergency room doctor in Gaza, his wife and all five of their children were killed by one of the 29,000 bombs that had been dropped at that point.
On Dec. 20, Netanyahu said, “Whoever thinks that we will stop is detached from reality.” He dismissed calls for another truce and vowed to fight on until “victory.” The Israeli Defense Minister said on Dec. 14 that the war will go on for several more months.
The U.N. said thousands were at risk of famine and that half of the two million displaced were going days without food.
Noelia Monge, head of emergencies for Action Against Hunger, said “Everything we are doing is insufficient to meet the needs of two million people. It is difficult to find flour and rice, and people have to wait hours to access latrines and wash themselves. We are experiencing an emergency like I have never seen before.”
The president and most members of Congress care first about their own families, but a very close second is their concern about their own re-election. They are all scared of the Israel Lobby.
But the slaughter that is going on now is obvious to all. What Israel is doing is creating even more enemies for the U.S. Any government official who does not speak out against all this bombing is at least practically responsible for the deaths and maiming of thousands of small children and really has the blood of these victims on their hands.
