“In an explosion when a blast goes off, everything around you gets weaponized. So all the masonry and bits of car sort of get whipped up in that energy, and then they hit a civilian at quite a high velocity, and that will penetrate the skin, and it will either break the bone underneath, or it will penetrate the chest or the abdomen. And that was the bulk of what we were seeing.”
Interviewer: And you’ve said Victoria that close to 90% of those you operated on in Gaza were children. UNICEF has called Gaza “the world’s most dangerous place to be a child”. From what you saw, why would UNICEF say that?
Dr. Victoria Rose: I think that as time went on, we saw more and more children. And certainly when I went back in the August, we were at Nsaid for a month, and I operated again every day, and most of my lists were just children.
Interviewer: What was it? Burns? Was it…
Dr. Victoria Rose: In an explosion when a blast goes off, everything around you gets weaponized. So all the masonry and bits of car sort of get whipped up in that energy, and then they hit a civilian at quite a high velocity, and that will penetrate the skin, and it will either break the bone underneath, or it will penetrate the chest or the abdomen. And that was the bulk of what we were seeing. But we also saw a lot of burns because of the heat of the blast, and then we saw bullet injuries. So we saw a lot of sniper injuries, but the children seemed to be specifically hit by quadcopters, which are drones that have fire power capability, and lots of them were sort of shot in the back, in the head, in the upper torso.
Interviewer: These are the intentional targeting of children? I mean, if it’s the head and torso and back, and they’re quadcopters, so they’re following…
Dr. Victoria Rose: So they’re operated by somebody that’s watching what they’re doing. So I assume that they are targeting children. What we saw was that the bulk of the children were between the age of five and probably fifteen and when we were with MSF the theory was that all of the children under five were of an age where their parents would pick them up and run with them. And obviously anyone fifteen and older is quite agile on their feet and can run away. But that tranche of children between five and fifteen are often sort of confused by what’s going on and not the quickest to get up, and so that was I think why we saw so many injuries in that age group.
Interviewer: And the trauma that these children must face, it’s been said of Gaza that there’s no post-traumatic stress disorder because there’s no post. Did you experience this? Were you able to spend time in some cases with these children?
Dr. Victoria Rose: There definitely were children that have huge psychological issues. We had a seven year old called Muhammad who had been in a blast injury that had bought the house down that he was in and he was with his father. And in the blast his father had died and his mother spoke beautiful English, and she said to me he just won’t speak to me, he won’t look at you, he doesn’t want to engage with any of the doctors, he just wants to see his father. It was quite a difficult problem because I was watching him not recover from an injury that he should recover from. In that we had amputated his leg and we’d closed it and we’d grafted it and we had closed all the wounds on his other leg. But the wounds just didn’t heal. He wasn’t eating, he kept getting infections, he just wasn’t progressing. And that totally has chosen his mental state.
Interviewer: And we know of course now that Gaza has the largest cohort of child amputees in the world.