Bodies of three children found on a steel tray inside what appears to be a hospital morgue in Gaza reveal writing on their legs, which had one side of their pants pulled up.
“Parents wrote their children’s names on their legs and abdomen,” Abdul Rahman Al Masri, head of the emergency department at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, told CNN . According to him, the parents’ fear was that “anything could happen” and the children could not be identified.
“This means they feel they are targets at any time and could be injured or martyred,” Al Masri added.
The black paint is a small sign of the fear and despair felt by families in the region, which has remained under constant air strikes from Israel since the attacks by the radical Islamic group Hamas on October 7.
Without identifying himself, he told the CNN that the number of deaths from Saturday (21) to Sunday (22) exceeded 200 in the territory.
“What we noticed today is that many parents write their children’s names on their legs so that they can be identified after air raids and if they get lost. This is a new phenomenon, which has just started in Gaza.”
“Many children are missing, many arrive here with broken skulls and it is impossible to identify them except through this writing.”
Over the past two weeks, hundreds of children have been pulled from the wreckage of dilapidated buildings hit by airstrikes in what is one of the most densely populated places in the world — many of them unrecognizable due to their injuries.
See also: The moment a hospital in Gaza is hit by an attack
As Israel maintains a “complete siege” on Gaza and crucial supplies run dangerously low, doctors in local hospitals have been forced to operate without painkillers, according to Doctors Without Borders.
Leo Cans, head of the entity’s operation in Jerusalem, told CNN this Monday (23) that the decrease in supplies meant that surgical operations were taking place “without the correct dose of narcotics, without the correct dose of morphine”.
“Pain control doesn’t happen. We have people being operated on without morphine. It happened to two children,” Cans said. “We have many children who are unfortunately among the injured. I was talking to one of our surgeons, who yesterday received a 10-year-old boy, burned over 60% of his body surface, and he didn’t end up taking painkillers.”
“There is no justification for preventing these essential medicines from reaching the population,” he continued.
He called “appalling” reports that parents in Gaza had resorted to writing their children’s names on their bodies in case they or the children were killed, and added that colleagues had told him that the families slept in the same room because “they wanted to live together or die together”.
See images of the conflict between Israel and Hamas
Source: CNN Brasil
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