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US doctor describes witnessing starvation in northern Gaza
Sam Attar reckons he left part of his soul in Gaza. It was the part of him that saw suffering and could not turn away. The part which now cannot forget.
It's been three weeks since he came home to Chicago but it might as well have been yesterday. The faces of that other world are with him: Jenna, the traumatised little girl wasting away, spectral pale on a hospital bed, while her mother shows Sam a phone video of the child's last birthday. Happy days before the disaster.
Then there was the man in his 50s, forgotten in a room, having had both legs amputated.
"He had lost his kids, his grandkids, his home," Sam recalls, "and he's alone in the corner of this dark hospital, maggots going out of his wounds and he was screaming: 'The worms are eating me alive please help me.' That was just one just one out of… I don't know, I just I stopped counting. But those are the people I still think of because they're still there."
The last trip - his third into Gaza since the war began - saw him join the first team of international medics to be embedded in a hospital in northern Gaza where malnutrition is at its most acute.
The mission was organised by the World Health Organisation (WHO) which has warned of looming famine. Some 30% of children below the age of two are reported to be acutely malnourished, and 70% of the population in northern Gaza is facing what the UN calls "catastrophic hunger."
Last month the UN Human Rights chief, Volker Turk, accused Israel of a potential war crime because of the food crisis in Gaza.
"The extent of Israel's continued restrictions on entry of aid into Gaza, together with the manner in which it continues to conduct hostilities, may amount to the use of starvation as a method of war," he said.
Sam Attar remembers the 32-year-old woman admitted suffering from severe malnutrition, with her son, and her mother and father in the room with her.
She underwent CPR - attempts to resuscitate the heart - but could not be saved.
"I had to call it," Sam says. The young mother lay on a bench, her left arm dangling towards the floor, eyes gazing upward in the moment of death. Across the room a nurse comforted her crying mother.
According to UN estimates last month the majority of those killed in the war have been women and children: 13,000 children, 9,000 women.
The US doctor wants to see a concerted push to get more aid into the north.
"The north just needs more access, it needs more food, more fuel, more water, the roads need to be opened… And there are so many patients that need to be evacuated from the north to the south and the problem is the south is also busy. I mean, the hospitals here are exploding."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-68915529