More Than 1,000 Gazan Children Are Dead. How Can We Even Begin To Mourn?

In my career as a Gazan American physician, I’ve delivered 1,000 babies. Israel has killed that many children in a week.

By Dana Elborno , TruthOut

My husband and I are 100 percent Palestinian from Gaza. We live in diaspora in the United States with my 5-month-old daughter. My husband’s entire immediate family is in Gaza. They live in the now-devastated Rimal neighborhood and are among the hundreds of thousands internally displaced in Gaza within the past seven days. This displacement is both due to airstrikes flattening more than 1,300 residential structures in Gaza, and due to the evacuation order issued October 13 to over 1 million people to flee the north for the south of Gaza.

Per the evacuation order, our family feared almost certain death if they stayed in their homes in the north. They made the harrowing trek to the south only to find Israel bombing the very road it had ordered them to take during the hours they were told it would be safe. These airstrikes targeted trucks evacuating families from refugee camps in the north and 70 were killed, overwhelmingly women and children. Somehow, our family survived and are spread out between relatives’ homes that are now hosting hundreds of displaced family members, UN schools and staying in the rubble of residential buildings that were already bombed. All day we have been getting the cruel and horrifying (though unsurprising) news that Israel is showering the south of Gaza with airstrikes. Many of the victims are those families who had just fled the north, raising the death toll in Gaza to over 2,700 in just one week.

To anyone calling and texting to ask if our family is okay — the answer is going to make you uncomfortable. No, they aren’t. Nowhere is safe and no Gazan is “okay” — whether alive, dead or injured. They are blockaded into a strip of land that is 25 miles long and about five miles wide, and have been bombed by more than 6,000 bombs in a seven-day period. Israel has cut off their access to food, water, electricity, gas and telecommunications. They have not had water for more than five days. One million children in Gaza have been without water for over five days…