Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Palestinian Ministry of Education released a report this week detailing that 11,923 students in Gaza have been killed by Israel’s total war in the past year. In addition, 19,199 have been wounded, many with life-altering injuries.
A physician working in Gaza last summer reported to HRW, “We are talking about a huge number of traumatic amputations, especially in children, leaving children with permanent disabilities. Also, many children who were wounded by shrapnel all over their faces and bodies, and I have seen children lose their eyesight due to injuries.”
Leila al-Kafarna, a mother of three with an injured husband continually expelled from place to place in Gaza, told HRW: “I carried my husband on my back, and we kept walking on foot through the sand and gunfire over our heads and planes dropping leaflets. Our children screamed along the way. It felt like the whole world ran and screamed with fear.”
Al-Kafarna continued,
” We finally felt a bit relieved and on October 20, Malek, my 13-year-old son, and I went to the market…. We went there for four consecutive days, waiting in line to get our [food] coupon, and it was on our fourth day that the attack happened. We were there for an hour-and-a-half. Suddenly, I felt something was off. I took Malek’s hand and told him we needed to leave, and that was when I heard something breaking from the walls. I looked up as the missile [munition] was hitting the supermarket, and I lost consciousness…. We were thrown away by the impact and surrounded by rubble. There were people and bodies around and on top of us. Body parts were everywhere. I woke up with a fire near my face, like a meter away, and I was still holding my son’s arm, so I started running, thinking I’m running with my son…. I was screaming at him to run fast before they bomb again, and then I felt like my son was light, as if there was no weight on the arm. So, I looked and didn’t see my son anywhere near me, and that was when I discovered that I was holding only his arm. I put the arm down and ran back, and I saw my son running and screaming “Allah, Allah,” and he started telling me to forgive him for any day he treated me badly, as if he was saying goodbye. Malek then fainted.”
One of the nearly 20,000 wounded school children, Malek lost his arm.
Although my headline says that the dead students did not go back to school this fall, actually none of the Gaza Strip’s 625,000 students could go back to school this year. That includes 45,000 first-graders….
https://www.juancole.com/2024/11/scholasticide-irrelevance-palestinian.html
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