CNN journalist
View through the “window into hell” of Gaza
Destruction and suffering dominate the Gaza Strip. photo
© Abed Rahim Khatib/dpa
The pressure on Israel to show more consideration for the civilian population in its actions against the Islamist Hamas is growing. A CNN journalist conveys the horrific consequences of the war.
Children with limbs torn off, a little boy with a disfigured face orphaned by Israel’s bombing – these are horrific, heartbreaking scenes that… CNN journalist Clarissa Ward shows us from a brief visit to a field hospital run by the United Arab Emirates in the Gaza Strip.
It’s a “brief look out of a window into hell,” as she says. According to the US broadcaster, the reporter circumvented Israel’s ban on international reporters entering the war zone by entering the sealed-off Gaza Strip via the Rafah border crossing with Emirati medics.
Israel has allowed some journalists to enter the country, but only if they are accompanied and supervised by the Israeli army. However, there are also international media that, like the German Press Agency, have employees in the Gaza Strip. The Egyptian Rafah border crossing is the only one through which aid supplies reach Gaza. Journalists are officially no longer allowed through.
Bad injuries
As Ward enters the hospital with a doctor, an explosion is heard. People have gotten used to Israeli bombs being dropped; it happens several times every day, the doctor describes. A few minutes later, a man and a 13-year-old will be wheeled in with blood-soaked bandages. The boy was missing half of his leg, and the man, who was in complete shock, also had his leg torn apart.
An eight-year-old girl whose thigh bone was shattered in a bomb blast explains in tears how her grandfather saved her. “They bombed the house in front of ours and then ours. I sat next to my grandfather and my grandfather helped me,” says the little girl as her mother stands at her bedside crying.
A few meters away lies a boy, not even two years old, with terrible wounds on his face. “He doesn’t know that his parents and siblings were killed,” Ward reports. When a doctor came who looked like his father, he screamed “Father, father, father,” says the little one’s aunt. He is still too young to understand the horror around him. Next to him lies a student whose right leg was amputated. Ten weeks ago she was studying engineering at university, says Ward.
Humanitarian catastrophe
“The world doesn’t listen to us,” complains the young woman. “Nobody cares about us.” Aid organizations have been complaining about the suffering of the civilian population for weeks. Most of the hospitals in the sealed-off coastal area no longer function, there is not enough food, often no electricity, and children drink dirty water due to a lack of drinking water.
“Gaza will go down in history as one of the greatest horrors in modern war history,” says Ward before she leaves after her “look into hell.” A privilege that the people of Gaza do not have.