Doctors say Israel is wiping out a generation of kids in Gaza

Dr. Anas Al-Kassem, trauma surgeon, Norfolk General Hospital and West Haldimand General Hospital: This is not war on Hamas. This is war on the children of Gaza.

Text on screen: In late December, a group of Canadian and American doctors travelled to Gaza on a medical mission.

Dr. Yasser Khan, ophthalmologist and associate professor, McMaster University and University of Toronto: When I got there, it was much worse than I ever imagined. Much worse than what I saw online before I went there. They are really suffering.

Al-Kassem: When you go to the hospital, you think you’re going to find
a hospital like [in] Canada. This is what we found.

This is the backyard of the hospital: all tents. People are just setting up plastic tents. It’s six degrees, seven degrees, so cold.

Because they think the hospitals would be safe. They bombarded the hospitals in the past, but they still feel it’s a little bit safer than going far away from the hospital.

So, the vicinity of the hospital is full. We had, in each hospital we worked at, about 25,000 people. This is 50,000 people in the hospital, in the entrance, on the stairs, in any backyard, front yard, any space they can find.

Khan: I remember the one scene. I’ll never forget this.

It was a fresh bombing. This mother walked in with her nine-year-old son in her arms, with rubble and dust all over him. Very thin.

Everybody’s thin there. Because, guess what? They’re being starved.

This thin boy comes in; the bones showing. I mean, he was cold and dead, right. But she was screaming and begging for somebody to check his pulse. But he was dead.

That was my first introduction to things. For me, it was a shock. I’d never seen that, to be honest. I hadn’t. But to them, it’s every day. Like, it’s every hour.

Seventy-five to 80 per cent of the people were children and women coming. I saw this with my own eyes. And even if you look at the refugee camps, they’re all children. Eighty per cent are children and women. You drop a 2,000-pound dumb bomb, a weapon of mass destruction, in an area, you’re gonna kill a lot of kids, a lot of women and a lot of civilians.

Al-Kassem: The children break your heart because if they are not wounded, they’re hungry and thirsty.

This is a kid, eight years old, that was hit with an airstrike in his house and the shrapnel went into the chest. I looked at it, I thought: “This is not compatible with life.”

You look at stuff that you don’t understand how the people and the children are still alive. But, Alhamdulillah, we had a great thoracic surgeon from Trillium, Dr. Ashraf, he was able to do surgery on this and we were able, Hamdulillah, to take the shrapnel and to save his life.

I can’t describe to you how happy his parents were when you bring that child back to them, because they already lost another child so at least they have one left. They’re so happy to the point that I never seen any juice or anything more than just water and dates in the tents but, I don’t know, they brought us juice to the physicians. I’m not sure where they brought it from. They are so grateful that, Hamdulillah, the child was saved.

This is war on the children because 50 per cent of what we’re seeing in the hospitals were children. Right?

This is not war on Hamas. This is war on the children of Gaza. They want to eliminate them, they want to just finish that generation and get them out of Gaza.

Every day, there’s 100 children dying in Gaza. Every 10 minutes, there’s a child dying.

Visit your MPs. They’re gonna tell you, “Oh, we’re busy.”

Tell them: “Gaza people are dying. You shouldn’t be busy.”