The 51 Day War by Max Blumenthal

Author:Max Blumenthal [Blumenthal, Max]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781568585123
Publisher: Nation Books
Published: 2015-05-29T10:00:00+00:00

Dr. Hani Shaniti shows a photo he took of one of the Dalou children badly wounded in the Israeli assassination attempt on Mohammed Deif.

I woke in the late morning to the thud of a naval shell and forced myself into the shower. With Gaza’s desalination plants bombed to smithereens, showering had become an unpleasant experience. Warm, brackish water piped in from a Mediterranean coast saturated with fresh sewage—Israel had repeatedly attacked Gaza’s ramshackle sewage infrastructure over the years—poured from the shower head, replacing my dried sweat with a soap-scented layer of grime. Some Gazans would purchase distilled water to wash off the dirty seawater that flowed from the shower. Hundreds of thousands of others in the strip had no running water at all, as the sanitation lines had been comprehensively destroyed across the decimated border areas. In the teeming UN schools where recently homeless refugees had taken shelter, doctors were battling an outbreak of scabies.

With my ability to travel around Gaza limited by the bombing, I spent the afternoon at Al-Shifa Hospital with Dan Cohen and Ebaa Rezeq. We wound up in an empty operating room with Dr. Hani Shaniti. A tall, slender surgeon in his early thirties, he described to us in a flat tone of having treated scores of unusual injuries characterized by tiny entry wounds that left extensive internal burns, possibly the result of DIME weapons like the kind Samir Homs had described at Kuwaiti Hospital in Rafah. The hospital was still running on short supply, with only three types of anesthetic and one size of needle, but highly professionalized staff like Shaniti had become experts at improvising with what little they had. He whipped out his phone to show us photos of some of the children delivered to the hospital by ambulance during the past day. Among them was a little girl from the al-Dalou family who had survived the five Israeli missiles sent crashing into her home, but who emerged from the rubble with her arms severed from her body. This child, who lay somewhere in Al-Shifa, sedated and behind a white sheet, had joined the more than 3,300 children wounded in the war. She, too, was a member of the shrapnel-lacerated people that Israeli Economics Minister Naftali Bennett accused of committing “self-genocide.”

Most of the doctors I met in Al-Shifa were burned out from weeks of amputations and shrapnel extractions. A few even seemed to be on the brink of insanity. The director of the emergency room kept us seated in his office for a thirty-minute-long venting session. “We are human beings! Can’t the world see that we’re human?” he bellowed again and again as Ebaa rolled her eyes. She had grown frustrated with the Palestinians pleading for Western validation of their humanity, as if the value of their lives was not self-evident. On the hospital’s second level, I encountered a mustachioed, middle-aged surgeon who demanded to know how much money Dan and I were making as journalists, accusing us of cashing in on Palestinian misery.

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