The cease-fire is over, but not before it offered a glimpse of the war’s horrors to Palestinians in Gaza and people around the world.
As residents used the fragile truce to find aid, search for loved ones under the rubble, and head home to survey the destruction, a particularly disturbing scene emerged.
Seen in a video that moves through the abandoned and disarrayed hallways of the pediatric intensive care unit at Al-Nasr Children’s Hospital in northern Gaza were several babies whose unattended bodies lay on separate hospital beds. A blurred version of the video was shared widely on social media this week, a grim and graphic contrast to other scenes of families reunited as hostages and prisoners were freed.
In a piece he reported, Mohammed Baalousha, a journalist with the Emirati TV channel Al-Mashhad, said he found the decomposing infants when he entered the pediatric ICU in the health facility in Gaza City. The hospital’s staff and critically ill patients were forced to evacuate in early November as the Israeli military focused its ground assault on the city, with hospitals under fire.
NBC News obtained raw footage from the channel and has reviewed its contents.
tl;Dr: short of just hitting “fuck it” and transporting these babies in a car or jury-rigging something, there was no way they were getting moved.
I’m a paramedic. The ambulances/gurneys/staff to do this kind of transfer are highly, highly specialized (and also, therefore, expensive). Even in the US, you’ll typically just see one for each regional pediatric center, typically covering a range of about 200 miles or a little over 300 km for sane measurement fans. This is not something that any old ambulance service or EMS agency just has laying around. I wouldn’t guess you’d find something like that in Gaza at all, given the state of oppression there, much less multiple units, much less in the middle of a military bombardment where they’re convinced that they’re transporting HAMAS tunnels in ambulances.
I can’t even begin to imagine how horrific it was for those hospital staff to have to leave those babies. I think it would break me.