Israel's shrapnel weapons causing devastating injuries to children: Report

Foreign surgeons working in the Gaza Strip say Israeli-made weapons designed to spray high levels of shrapnel continue to cause horrific injuries to children in places packed with civilians in the besieged territory.

The Guardian quoted volunteer doctors at Gaza hospitals that many of the deaths, amputations and life-changing wounds to children they have treated came from the firing of missiles and shells, packed with additional metal designed to fragment into tiny pieces of shrapnel.

The British newspaper website cited six foreign doctors, who have worked at two hospitals in Gaza, the European and al-Aqsa, in the last three months.

All surgeons said that a majority of their operations were on children hit by small pieces of shrapnel that leave barely discernible entry wounds but create extensive destruction inside the body.

“About half of the injuries I took care of were in young kids,” said Feroze Sidhwa, a trauma surgeon from California, who worked at the European hospital in southern Gaza in April.

“We saw a lot of so-called splinter injuries that were very, very small to the point that you easily missed them while examining a patient. Much, much smaller than anything I’ve seen before but they caused tremendous damage on the inside.”

Israel bombs another refugee camp in Gaza, killing 9, including 5 kids

The bombing struck the Bureij refugee camp while children were playing in the street of the camp, witnesses say.

All of the surgeons described encountering extensive wounds caused by “fragmentation” weapons, which they said have contributed to alarming rates of amputations since the war began, wrote the online news website.

They said the injuries were seen in adults and children but that the damage done was likely to be more severe in younger bodies.

Sidhwa said, “Children are more vulnerable to any penetrating injury because they have smaller bodies.”

“When children have lacerated blood vessels, their blood vessels are already so small it’s very hard to put them back together,” the surgeon added.

An orthopedic surgeon from North Carolina, Mark Perlmutter, said he saw “demolished bones,” in an X-ray that looked like a tractor-trailer drove over them.

Children hit by multiple pieces of tiny shards, he said, often died and many of those who survived lost limbs.

An Australian surgeon, who worked at the al-Aqsa hospital in central Gaza in April, said he recovered shrapnel made up of small metal cubes about three millimeters wide while operating on a young boy.

Explosives experts who reviewed pictures of the shrapnel and the doctors’ descriptions of the wounds told the Guardian they were consistent with bombs and shells fitted with a “fragmentation sleeve” around the explosive warhead to maximize casualties.

Trevor Ball, a former US Army explosive ordnance disposal technician said the metal cubes recovered by the surgeons are typically found in Israeli-made weapons such as certain types of Spike missiles fired from drones.

UNICEF: Gaza's children living under constant Israeli terror

More than 14,000 Palestinian children have reportedly been killed in Gaza during months-long Israeli aggression.

He said the doctors’ accounts of tiny entry wounds are also consistent with glide bombs and tank rounds fitted with fragmentation sleeves such as the M329 APAM shell, which is designed to penetrate buildings and the M339 round which its manufacturer, Elbit Systems of Haifa, describes as “highly lethal against dismounted infantry”.

Another weapons expert questioned the use of such weapons in areas of Gaza crowded with civilians.

He said that when such weapons “are fired into areas with high concentrations of civilians living in the open with nowhere to shelter, the military knows that most of the casualties will be those civilians.”

UNICEF, the UN children’s agency, has recently described the number of wounded children as “staggering” in Gaza.

The United Nations estimates that Israel’s military forces have killed more than 38,350 people, at least 8,000 of whom confirmed to be children, in Gaza since early October. Tens of thousands have also been wounded.

Press TV’s website can also be accessed at the following alternate addresses:

www.presstv.ir