In 2008, an Israeli sniper shot a 16 year old, Abed Abu Oida, in his spine, destroying three of his vertebrae and leaving him paralyzed and bleeding on the roof where he lay for 15 minutes before his younger brother found him.
The 13-year-old dragged Abed to the stairs and down into the family’s home. The invasion outside continued, preventing ambulances from coming for Abed. Three hours after his injury, the teen finally reached a hospital in Gaza City where doctors, after seeing his injury, were surprised to see the youth was still alive. Unable to provide adequate emergency care in Gaza, they immediately loaded him into an emergency transfer ambulance bound for the Rafah border crossing to Egypt.
ingaza.wordpress.com/2008/07…
When months later I met Abed in a Cairo hospital, he was near-deathly emaciated, with appallingly large bedsores on his backside and feet. These festering bedsores—a result of the poor care he was given in the various Cairo hospitals he was shifted to—would be the cause of other ailments which plagued him and eventually caused his death. Isolated from his family who could not get Egypt’s permission to exit Gaza to be with their paralyzed son, Abed began to succumb to his injuries.
Egyptian activists I met in Cairo were helping Abed as much as they could.
He was then transferred back to Gaza, to the (then) al-Wafa Rehabilitation Hospital, where he was treated and slightly improved.
He was in that hospital, east of Gaza City, when the Israelis bombed the premises & buildings in January 2009, including with White Phosphorous. There were roughly 60 patients, nearly all of whom were either invalid or unconscious, unable to flee the shelling. Staff were able to move them to one wing of the small building away from the worst impact of the bombing.
When I visited days later, spongy blobs of the white phosphorous shells littered the complex grounds, bursting into intense flames anew when poked a little.
ingaza.wordpress.com/2009/01…
Hospital staff told me they had been on the phone throughout the evening of bombing, trying to coordinate via the ICRC with the Israelis, begging them to stop attacking the hospital. The Director also told me this had been the 4th time the Zionists had attacked the hospital. [That was in 2009, not 2023]
But some years later, in 2014, Abed succumed to the injuries he sustained in 2008.
He was a gentle young man who used to play football, also lift weights, and tried to live as normal a life as one could under the brutal, continually-expanding rule of foreign occupiers.
ingaza.wordpress.com/2014/11…
Try to imagine just how many such accounts there are by now, since long before 2023...lives destroyed, families devastated, by the criminality of the Israelis who keep on killing civilians...