Abandoned babies found decomposing in Gaza hospital weeks after it was evacuated

Stamau123@lemmy.world to World News@lemmy.world – 465 points – Abandoned babies found decomposing in Gaza hospital weeks after it was evacuated
nbcnews.com

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.

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The world needs to act to curtail Israeli crimes against humanity.

At the very least sanctions and boycotts need to be enforced.

8 more...

Before someone tries to make the claim, no, the hospital staff couldn't have taken the babies with them. These were premature babies in oxygen-saturated powered incubators, which could not be moved.

Possibly if a fully set up ambulance was available for each baby, it could be done, but the IDF has been bombing ambulances too and there aren't that many available anyways.

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.

Yeah. I can't fathom most of what this has been like for people in Gaza. I also can't imagine just dead ass leaving a baby behind.* I have to imagine they thought they'd be back soon or that someone else was coming, or the babies were already dead and there were no body bags or time. This is painful to think about.

*Not a criticism, I'm awake when I shouldn't be, words am hard, can't think of a better way to frame it.

@conditional_soup these were not ordinary babies that you can just carry around, even if you're not under sniper fire and trying to evacuate a bunch of other wounded kids. Premies are tiny and vulnerable. They were dying from lack of oxygen.

The staff probably hoped that the forces who took over the hospital would have mercy on these babies.

This, and other similar cases, are exactly why civilized countries don't bomb hospitals.

There are many people who are highly immobile in hospitals.

I have no respect for Hamas, but the IDF is at least as bad. They only try to pretend they are civilized.

They always claim Hamas uses hospitals to perform attacks, but their evidence is even less convincing than the WMD evidence Bush used to justify the Iraq invasion.

There is absolutely no evidence that Hamas was using this hospital to conduct attacks (or frankly any hospital). The Israeli policy is terrorism, plain and simple. The goal is terrorism. The method is terrorism.

Fucking hell. Like it's actual hell. God damn. Those poor families.

Hell is full of people that deserve it, war is mostly innocent people. Not exactly the correct quote from M*a*s*h but close enough.

Where the pro lifers at?

They don't care after they are born. Bootstraps and all I guess.

Here and absolutely and completely horrified... Pro-life for ALL life

If you weren’t a raging hypocrite you’d have done something about it

Look I agree generally with shitting on pro life people but that person would not have been able to do anything at all about these babies and you know it

I would do anything to have been able to save them... I am anti war, anti genocide, pro universal healthcare; pro-life shouldn't just refer to one issue and it's awful that the rhetoric has gone that way

My son was in NICU. I thought of his time in hospital as soon as the news about the Palestinian hospital broke. This is terrible.

"Decomposing babies"

Can we just disband Israel already...

Who cares? They've already been born!

-Pro Life Republicans who support Israel.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

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.

UNICEF also warned in early November that “children in Gaza are hanging by a thread, particularly in the north,” and that Al-Nasr Hospital had reportedly sustained damage in an attack that impacted lifesaving equipment.

Doctors at Al Shifa, one of Gaza’s largest hospitals, which faced intense bombardment and raids by Israeli forces last month, struggled to keep dozens of premature babies alive due to power outages.

Both health officials said they notified the International Committee of the Red Cross to help with the patients left behind in the evacuation process but said that the ICRC has been unable to commit to working in such conditions since the beginning of the war.

“This is more evident when taking into account that the IDF assisted in moving newborns from the pediatric ward of the Shifa hospital to safety, as well as provide Israeli incubators in the process,” the statement added.

The original article contains 1,405 words, the summary contains 213 words. Saved 85%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

What happened to the IDF coming in and supposedly save all the kids? They couldn't even do their own propaganda op and just left all the babies to die? The israelis are true monsters.

Poor babies.

I'd bet Hamas did not think that far ahead that when they planned their attack.

Israel definitely did when they started bombing hospitals. You act like it's Hamas that pulled the trigger for them, but deep down you know that's fucking bullshit.

These babies were killed by Israel, and nobody else.