© Anadolu AgencyInjured Palestinian children wait to receive medical treatment at the Nasser hospital after an Israeli airstrike in Khan Yunis, in the southern Gaza Strip, on December 5, 2023.
Six volunteer doctors, who had worked at Gaza's European and al-Aqsa hospitals in the past three months, said a majority of their operations were on children hit by small pieces of shrapnel that leave barely discernible entry wounds but create extensive destruction inside the body.
Speaking to The Guardian on Thursday, they added that the Israeli fragmentation bombs, which are loaded with shrapnel, contribute to alarming rates of deaths and amputations among Gaza children.
Feroze Sidhwa, a trauma surgeon from California, who worked at the European hospital in April, said that he had encountered "splinter injuries".
"About half of the injuries I took care of were in young kids. We saw a lot of so-called splinter injuries that were very, very small to the point that you easily missed them while examining a patient. Much, much smaller than anything I've seen before but they caused tremendous damage on the inside," he added.
"Children are more vulnerable to any penetrating injury because they have smaller bodies. Their vital parts are smaller and easier to disrupt... The artery that feeds the leg, the femoral artery, is only the thickness of a noodle in a small child. It's very, very small. So repairing it and keeping the kid's limb attached to them is very difficult."
Mark Perlmutter, an orthopaedic surgeon from North Carolina, said children hit by fragmentation shards often died and many of those who survived lost limbs.
"X-rays showed demolished bones with a pinhole wound on one side, a pinhole on the other, and a bone that looks like a tractor trailer drove over it. The children we operated on, most of them had these small entrance and exit points," noted Perlmutter, who had worked at the European hospital.
"Most of the kids that survived had neurologic injuries and vascular injuries, a major cause of amputation. The blood vessels or the nerves get hit, and they come in a day later and the leg is dead or the arm is dead."
Meanwhile, The Guardian spoke to explosives experts who reviewed pictures of the shrapnel found by medical staff and the doctors' descriptions of the wounds they had treated, and said the accounts were consistent with the bombs the Israeli military fits with "fragmentation sleeves" around warheads.
Amnesty International first documented the Israeli army's use of fragmentation bombs in the 2009 Gaza offensive and said the explosives "appear designed to cause maximum injury".
Israel unleashed a genocidal war on the Gaza Strip on October 7 after the Hamas resistance group carried out its historic operation against the occupying entity in retaliation for the regime's intensified atrocities against the Palestinian people.
According to the Gaza Health Ministry, the Tel Aviv regime has so far killed at least 38,345 Palestinians, mostly women and children, in Gaza, and injured 88,295 others.
Recently, The Lancet, a leading general medical journal, estimated that the death toll from the Israeli aggression could be 186,000 or even more as many Palestinians have succumbed to indirect impacts of the Gaza war.
Comment: The article is disturbing, and so are the question it can lead to.
When considering the broad support given by many, especially Western Governments, to what is happening in Gaza, is the way Israel fights in Gaza how several Western Government expect to eventually fight their own citizens if the citizens decide not to support the policies their governments would like to force upon them? Another question is if such a possible conflict is what some actors would even like to provoke intentionally in order to have the government help to weaken the populations and countries in order to facilitate them taking over the spoils? Notice also how there are discussions about establishing ceasefires in Gaza, but when Gaza deal must allow Israel to keep fighting - Netanyahu are such discussions used by Israel to wear down the psychology of the people in Gaza by repeated waves of hope for peace alternated by violent oppression? However, just because governments or nefarious actors might have certain intentions, does not mean that all goes according to plan.
See also:
Israel has deliberately destroyed all of Gaza's hospitals with US approval and support
The Lancet study estimates death toll in Gaza 186,000 or even more
Notes:
1) A fragmentation sleeve is metal casing fitted to the outside an explosive device. When the explosive detonates the sleeve fragments and the fragments move away at high velocity from the point of detonation. The way the sleeve fragments depends on the construction and the material used for the sleeve. In addition to the sleeves fitted on the outside, there can also be small metal pieces packed below the main casing.
2) According to the article in the Guardian, used as referenced in the article from PressTV, the most common size of the wounds were one or two millimetre. From the article it is possible to find additional information about the means used to create the havoc: the Spike missile, the 120mm Anti-Personel/Anti-Material Tank Cartridge, M329, and the Hatzav 120mm M339 High Explosive Multi Purpose Tank Cartridge. A video uploaded by Elbit Systems Land shows how it works. Elbit Systems Ltd acquired IMI Systems and renamed it Elbit Systems Land. It is traded as ESLT.