Aid For Gaza & The West Bank Sought From International Communities & Governments

Press Release August 3, 2014

Gaza Ministry of Health, Palestine

Kuwaiti Maternity Hospital in Rafah unable to cope with scores of dead and injured

The Ministry of Health Gaza is reeling from the reports coming out of Rafah, where scores have been killed and injured today, including 10 dead and over 30 injured in yet another attack on an UNRWA school, this time the Anas Ibn Malik Prepatory School sheltering thousands of forcibly displaced persons.

A group of women, children and older people were sitting against the wall at the entrance to the school seeking shade from the sun when they were struck.

This atrocity follows dawn attacks in Rafah on the Ghoul and Abu Jazzar family homes which left 18 dead and dozens injured, and brings the number killed in Gaza today to at least 118.

Missile and mortar attacks are continuing in Rafah, putting enormous pressure on the 20-bed Kuwaiti Maternity Hospital, which is overflowing with dead and injured. There are 30 bodies lying on the floor of the dental clinic, and children’s bodies stored in ice-cream, flower, and vegetable freezers as there are no morgue facilities. Other bodies have already been taken for burial in the western cemetery, the eastern cemetery being inaccessible because of Israeli shell-fire.

“We desperately need blood, we do not have enough for transfusions,” said Fatma Abu Musa, a laboratory technician at Kuwaiti Hospital. “We only have two operating theatres, one for minor surgery. They have to operate on two people at the same time on one operating table, major surgeries, with intestines on the outside, eyes on the outside. It is impossible to deal with all the wounded.”

Kuwaiti Hospital has sent many patients on to the Emirati Red Crescent Maternity Hospital nearby, which is slightly bigger but equally unequipped to deal with the types of injuries presenting.

The Ministry of Health Gaza has made numerous calls to the international community over recent weeks for assistance – calls which have largely gone unanswered.

We again implore of you that you take immediate concrete action to bring the Israeli carnage in Gaza to an end.

We demand in the name of humanity that the international community act to:

1. Stop Israeli war crimes immediately, and end the attacks on Gaza;
2.Establish safe evacuation routes for the injured to be transported from Rafah to other hospitals in Gaza for treatment; and
3.Ensure the prompt and safe transfer outside of Palestine for all of those patients who need it.

Contacts:

Dr Yousef AbuAlrish, Deputy Minister of Health +972 597 918 339

Dr Medhat Abbas, Director General, Ministry of Health +972 599 403 547

http://www.globalresearch.ca/killing-palestinian-children-and-new-born-babies-rafah-maternity-hospital-bombed-by-israel-with-utmost-accuracy/5394667

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As it is below; so it is above

July 21, 2014

Massacre in Shujaiya: Dozens Killed as Israel Shells Eastern Gaza City – Photos

5 girls lost their mother 28 yr old Israa, Nihad lost his wife..fainted when he heard the news.



Dozens of men, women and children were killed in the early hours of Sunday as Israel indiscriminately shelled the eastern Gaza City neighborhood of Shujaiya.

Some sixty bodies have already been removed from the rubble of homes and apartment buildings, and the number of injured is more than two hundred, Palestinian health ministry spokesman Dr. Ashraf al-Qidra told local media.

But the true death toll could be even higher. The International Committee of the Red Cross said it coordinated a two-hour “humanitarian truce” to allow the rescue of the injured and the removal of bodies.

Gaza is a small territory, home to 1.8 million people, and no place in the territory has been safe from Israeli land, sea and air attacks. Egypt’s military dictatorship, closely allied with Israel, has kept the Rafah crossing tightly sealed.

Eyewitnesses post photos of aftermath:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/massacre-in-shujaiya-dozens-killed-as-israel-shells-eastern-gaza-city-photos/5392435
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As it is below; so it is above

Evidence Emerges of Israeli “Shoot To Cripple” Policy In the Occupied West Bank
 
Israeli soldiers use live fire and expanding bullets to shatter the legs of West Bank protesters.

by Max Blumenthal   August 8, 2014

At 10 PM on August 8, a twenty-year-old resident of the Al Amari refugee camp named Muhammad Qatri arrived dead at the Palestinian Medical Complex in Ramallah. He had been killed by Israeli soldiers during a protest near the illegal West Bank settlement of Psagot — shot through the heart right on the spot on his shirt that read, “Gaza.”

From the parking lot outside the hospital’s emergency room, a group of men bellowed chants about the latest unarmed young man to fall before Israeli gunfire in an usually bloody few weeks. I arrived at the hospital gates with a colleague and met Dr. Rajai Abukhalil, a 26-year-old resident physician who had just phoned Qatri’s father to deliver the bad news. Not even midway through his night shift, Abukhalil was already on his fifth coffee and still awaiting a free moment to take breakfast.

At a coffee kiosk behind the hospital’s emergency room, Abukhalil told me Qatri’s body arrived cold. The soldiers who killed him had apparently delayed his evacuation by at least an hour, possibly preventing the opportunity to save his life.

Most disturbing about the killing was how familiar scenes like it had become. According to Abukhalil, the Israeli army has exhibited a clear pattern of either shooting to kill or shooting to cripple over the past six months. Rather than disperse protests with traditional means like teargas and rubber coated metal bullets, the army has begun firing at protesters’ knees, femurs, or aiming for their vital organs.

Like the army’s old policy of breaking the arms of young stone throwers to deter protests during the First Intifada, the new tactic suggests an attempt to winnow out the ranks of demonstrators by shattering their legs. By eroding the front line of protests through brute force, Israel’s military is apparently trying to undermine the capacity of Palestinian society to mount an effective new Intifada.

“It’s very much like the bone breaking policy of the First Intifada but it’s a more specific and less media attention-grabbing policy,” Abukhalil explained to me. “No matter how much people want to resist, everyone’s human. If you get shot or someone next to you gets shot, you won’t be on the front line at the next clash. And then there will be no front line.”

Abukhalil said he first witnessed signs of the shoot to cripple policy in the Jalazone refugee camp near Ramallah. Following the gratuitous killing of a 15-year-old boyshot in the back in December by a sniper hiding near his school, protests raged throughout the camp. As the army cracked down, it began aiming for the knees of demonstrators, according to Abukhalil.

“Every Friday we’d have ten to twenty guys coming in [to the hospital] all injured around the knees,” he explained. He added that many of the wounded demonstrators claimed to have heard the Israeli commander in Jalazone, “Hilal,” order his soldiers to cripple as many protesters as they could.

At the 10,000-strong Palestine Authority-sanctioned march on June 24 from Ramallah to the Qalandia checkpoint separating the occupied city from Jerusalem, the shoot to cripple tactic was on bold display. The first twenty injuries doctors at the Palestinian Medical Complex treated had been shot above the waist — soldiers aimed at their vital organs. Two ultimately died while others were miraculously saved despite critical injuries.

“It was shoot to kill at first,” Abukhalil recalled. “We had eight to ten extremely critical cases. It was amazing that they made it. One had a bullet in the heart. The other had a bullet in the major vessels in the neck. Then after the first injuries it shifted, it was shoot to cripple. We had more than 100 injuries in the femur and the knee.”

By the following day, the Palestinian Ministry of Health reported a total of 280 injuries, most from Israeli live fire. Abukhalil told me it took four days for the hospital’s team of orthopedic surgeons to complete their operations. “Many of the injured will suffer for life,” said. “They have metal in their legs; many will definitely have problems walking if not be crippled 100%. Many won’t be able to run or walk long distances without pain.”

Doctors at the Palestinian Medical Center have recently begun treating critical wounds inflicted by “dum dum” bullets.Banned under customary human rights law, the ammunition is designed to cause extreme damage to tissue by expanding outwards upon entry, thereby preventing the bullet from exiting.

“You can’t extract it,” Abukhalil said of the dum dum bullets. “It goes in and explodes and expands outwards. If you try to remove it you could harm the muscle or the bone so if it hits the bone you just have to keep it in there.”

Doctors who had worked at the hospital for more than a decade told Abukhalil they had not seen dum dum bullets in use since the bloody days of the Second Intifada in 2000.

For the first time since the beginning of Israel’s most recent assault on the Gaza Strip that has left over 1900 dead, the Palestinian Medical Center in Ramallah has begun receiving survivors evacuated from Gaza for post-op care. I met two of them in the hospital’s recovery ward.

In a bed on one side of a room lay Majdi Abu Ganima, his right leg badly fractured and swollen from shrapnel received during Israel’s combined aerial and artillery assault on the neighborhood of Shujaiya. On the other side of the room was Waseem Washa’a, also the victim of compound fractures to his legs inflicted by artillery and F-16 fire during the attack.

The two young men lay in a semi-sedate state while a few male family members stood around bantering. Washa’a told me he was wounded in the street while attempting to evacuate under heavy shelling. He was rescued by strangers as his home was destroyed by missiles from an F-16, arriving at Gaza City’s overcrowded Shifa Hospital the same day. His entireneighborhood was flattened and he has no idea what became of his friends and neighbors. He was lucky to be alive.

Still weary from the trauma he had endured, Washa’a spoke to me in short, halting sentences. Finally, as our interview concluded, he remarked to me, “Open up Gaza. End the siege. That’s what I want to say.”

A “Day of Rage” has been called across occupied Palestine to protest the continuing attack on Gaza. With protests expected in all West Bank cities and occupied East Jerusalem, many more may fall in agony before the barrels of soldiers shooting to cripple.

http://www.alternet.org/world/evidence-emerges-israeli-shoot-cripple-policy-occupied-west-bank?page=0%2C1&paging=off&current_page=1#bookmark

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