There is a scene in acclaimed US Civil War film, Glory, where the main character, Captain Robert Gould Shaw, receives treatment for a simple injury in a crude and crowded hospital, while the fate of another solider can be heard behind a thin partition screen nearby. The terrified sobs from the solider on the other side of the screen leave no doubt as to what is occurring. “Oh my God, please don’t cut any more, please!” he cries out with a wail more animal than human as blood splats the screen and his leg is amputated without anesthetic. It is haunting viewing. When a limb is shattered or becomes infected, if there is no other way to treat the damage or infection then the only way to save the patient’s life is to amputate. Before the advent of anesthesia, patients would be plied with alcohol, given a leather strap to bite down on and then physically restrained before amputation. Advances in the science of anesthesia have consigned such horrors to history, but not so in Gaza. With the deliberate Israeli bombing of hospitals and other health infrastructure over the last three months, the Gazan health system has collapsed. Surgeons now find themselves having to operate in appalling conditions, often without electricity, running water and in states of terrible hygiene. Operations of all sorts are being performed without anesthesia. For amputations, it is on a scale that is hard to comprehend. And the patients are often the young.
To begin to grasp the magnitude of this, imagine that you are trapped in a long corridor with numbered doors on either side and are trying to find your way out. You pull the handle of door number one, searching for an exit, only it opens onto a crude surgical room with a fully conscious patient on a makeshift operating table. The patient looks up at you with terror in their eyes, but you are not looking into the face of a battle-hardened solider but a petrified kindergarten aged child, a four-year-old girl about to have her leg cut off without anesthetic. As the surgical saw cuts into the girl’s fragile limb and she screams out, you slam the door behind you, unable to process what you have just witnessed. You stumble forward and try another door, only the scene repeats itself, this time it’s a toddler, a two-year-old boy halfway through having his arm amputated. You slam the door with his screams ringing in your ears and open another, only to find a tiny infant girl lying there having her leg and arm removed. You vomit and stumble on, frantically trying to find a way out of this hell, but no matter which door you try, it opens onto a child having a limb cut off without pain relief. As the numbers on the doors climb: 10, 20, 50, you notice that lots of the children are having more than one limb amputated. Some, all of their limbs. For them the hell repeating four times over. The door numbers rise higher and you notice children with other injuries too: many have burns the likes of which you have never imagined or are blinded, facing their amputation and the rest of their lives in total darkness. As the numbers continue to rise: 100, 200, 300, you think you recognize children from your neighborhood, boys and girls you have seen ride their bike, run and play, their faces now barely recognizable behind masks of pain and sorrow. In some rooms there is a distraught parent by the child’s side. In others the children are all alone, orphaned by Israeli machines of war that have left them parentless, lying on a cold table having a limb or limbs cut off. The numbers keep climbing: 600, 700, 800. Your head swoons at the avalanche of pain. As the numbers reach to over a thousand and you open the final door, there in front of you lies your own child, begging you to save them as you wake screaming into the night. For you it is a nightmare. For Gaza it is reality.
Were it a single child, just one child, who had suffered such a hellish ordeal, it would be utterly horrific. Yet in under three months, over one thousand children have had one or more limbs amputated in Gaza without any anesthetic. A thousand children. Think about that for a second. And that’s just the young. Mothers, wives, aunts, grandmothers, fathers, husbands, uncles, grandfathers, account for an unimaginable tsunami of suffering.
Despite popular misconception, nearly all surgery during the US Civil War was carried out under anesthetic. According to Union records, during the four long years that the US Civil War raged, 254 soldiers underwent an amputation without anesthetic. Such horrors have been depicted in countless books, films and television shows on the US Civil War. Yet in Gaza, more amputations than that are occurring without anesthetic to children alone every month. Add in other injuries Gazans are enduring without anesthetic—burns, blindings, shrapnel wounds and myriad other horrors—and it is beyond belief. Those that survive are slowly being starved and denied water. In many cases the living will envy the dead. But that’s the plan. Yesterday Israeli minister Amichai Eliyahu urged that Israel “must find ways for Gazans that are more painful than death.”
In that Israel is succeeding.
And shame on all of us that it continues.