Children in Gaza Face Amputations Without Anesthesia

by Aysha Qamar

More than 1,000 children in Gaza have had one or more limbs amputated since Israel declared its war on Palestine on Oct. 7, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF)

In a report released in late December 2023, UNICEF said that more than 9,000 children live injured in the Gaza Strip, with many facing the loss of a limb.

James Elder, a UNICEF spokesperson, said that the children in Gaza were enduring “10 weeks of help, l and not one of them can escape.” Elder recently visited Palestine and noted the few remaining hospitals in Gaza are overwhelmed with children, many of whom are now amputees.

“As a parent of a critically sick child told me: ‘Our situation is pure misery… I don’t know if we will make it through this,” he said.

Due to the “total” blockade imposed by Israel on the strip, children are receiving treatment and being amputated without anesthesia and access to electricity and running water.

According to UNICEF, health workers are forced to perform surgeries in unhygienic conditions without painkillers.

“Sometimes we give some of them sterile gauze (to bite on) to reduce the pain,” said Abu Emad Hassanein, a nurse in Gaza City, according to Reuters.

“We know that the pain they feel is more than someone would imagine, beyond what someone their age would stand,”  Hassanein told Reuters, referring to young children he was treating.

According to the Palestinian health authorities, over 19,400 Palestinians have been killed in the enclave since Israel declared its war on Gaza on Oct. 7. Of the over 19,000 about 70% of them are women and children.

A report by Save the Children, issued in October, found that the number of children reportedly killed in Gaza in the first few weeks surpassed the annual number of children killed in all the world’s armed conflict zones since 2019.

Per the United Nations World Health Organization (WHO), while critical care is needed eight of the 36 hospitals in the Gaza Strip are even partially functional.

“It’s not as if there’s… a natural disaster preventing anesthesia [from entering] Gaza,” Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund (PCRF) founder Steve Sosebee said in an interview with Democracy Now.

“It’s absolutely unimaginable that this is happening in our modern world,” he said.

According to Sosebee, the number of child amputees is likely to grow “because a lot of these kids have significant injuries [that mean] they’ll need amputations in the coming weeks and months.”

“Not only were they amputated without anesthesia, but many of them were amputated in a very quick fashion,” he said.

According to PCRF, before Oct. 7 Gaza was already suffering an “amputee crisis,” with healthcare requiring medical referrals for Palestinians in the enclave, current conditions have only worsened the situation.

Statistics before October indicate that 12% of Palestinian children aged 2-17 faced one or more functional difficulties, while 21% of households in Gaza include at least one member with physical or mental disabilities.

Procedures, including amputations, are not only carried out without anesthetics but rushed with children having little to no time to recover, UNICEF officials said. Even those who can go through recovery suffer from the constant threat of death due to Israeli air strikes and bombings, a UNICEF spokesperson said.

“The Gaza Strip is the most dangerous place in the world to be a child. And day after day, that brutal reality is reinforced,” Elder said during a December briefing at the Palais des Nations in Geneva.