An American paediatrician who volunteered in the Gaza Strip says the injuries inflicted on Palestinian aid seekers at sites run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) suggest that Israeli forces there shot the men and boys deliberately, by targeting and maiming specific body parts on specific days.
Ahmed Yousaf made the comments to Al Jazeera from the Jordanian capital, Amman, on Tuesday, hours after returning from Gaza, where he had spent two and a half weeks working at Al-Aqsa Hospital in central Deir el-Balah and al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.
The doctor said he witnessed “mass casualty incidents” from Israeli shootings at the food distribution points run by the United States-backed GHF on an almost daily basis.
The boys and young men came in with very specific injuries, “almost like a daily pattern”, he said.
“Meaning on a given day, say Monday, we’d get 40,60 patients coming in at a given time, and they would all be shot in the legs, or in the pelvic area, or the groin on a given day, just kind of a similar pattern. And the next day, we would see upper body, chest, thoracic pattern, and then there were days we saw only head wounds, upper neck bullet wounds. And what it felt like, at least for me, the position that I went with, was that somebody behind the gun that day was going to choose the way they were either going to maim or decide to kill people,” he said.
“It was age indiscriminate.”
Yousaf’s comments are the latest by medical staff in Gaza that accuse Israeli forces and US contractors of targeted and indiscriminate violence at the GHF sites.
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Doctors Without Borders, known by its French acronym MSF, said last week that the GHF-run food distributions in famine-stricken Gaza have become sites of “orchestrated killing and dehumanisation“, while Human Rights Watch said the shootings amount to serious violations of international law and war crimes.
On Tuesday alone, at least 19 aid seekers were killed at GHF sites in Gaza, while many more were wounded, according to medics and witnesses.
At least 1,838 Palestinians have been killed while seeking aid, and another 13,409 have been wounded since the GHF began its operations in late May, official figures show.
Israel and the GHF deny the killings.
‘All of Gaza is a death trap’
Yousaf, the US paediatrician, said the victims at the sites were mainly boys and young men, as they are often the ones taking the risk to try to get food for their families, “given the dynamic of the risk associated with trying to carry a 5-pound [2.3kg] bag of flour, maybe kilometres, sometimes”.
“The people would tell us they were sometimes at the site, or around the area, or they were trying to leave… and they were shot indiscriminately; it was like they were being sprayed. It seemed quite obvious to them and to us, from a pattern-recognition perspective, in terms of who came to the ER [emergency room], that on a given day, whoever was making the decision behind the trigger was choosing a very specific pattern of fire,” he said.
The doctor went on to describe all of Gaza as a “death trap”.
“It is a cage in which people are being marked for death. It almost feels like there is a quota for the number of people that need to be killed on a given day,” Yousaf said.
On the days that Palestinians stayed away from the GHF sites, because Israel allowed in more aid trucks, there would be more intense air attacks, he said.
“The last four days that we were there, when there was a bit more aid access via food trucks that were allowed in, the risk profile changed and them going to the food distribution sites wasn’t nearly worth the risk because there was some food elsewhere, we saw a significant uptick in bomb blasts on the streets, homes, vehicles. So the pattern of the MCIs – the mass casualty incidents – changed from bullet wounds, mostly boys and young men, to just indiscriminate bombings. We saw women and children, elderly, on the days the bombs come in,” he told Al Jazeera.
The doctor described the Israeli atrocities in Gaza as a “genocide”.
One clear aspect of this, he said, was Israel’s refusal to let him and his colleagues take in medical supplies or baby formula.
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“When we were screened by the [Israeli military] at the border, the vast majority of us had things confiscated from our bags. Things like food and multivitamins and antibiotics and medical supplies, like stethoscopes, everything you can imagine, that we wished we could have to treat the people on the ground in Gaza,” he said.
“And this resulted in a situation in which, when those patients came in, in different stages of dying, screaming in pain for their mothers… we knew that in any other environment, we could have done something for them, but in the environment of Gaza, in the death trap that is Gaza completely, we were unable to give them the aid that they deserve, to provide the human dignity and humanity that they deserve.”